“Simpsons Safari” Represents the Supreme Laziness of The Simpsons’s Decline

The greatest sin of Mike Scully’s time in charge of The Simpsons — that period from season 9 to season 12 when the show fell from grace — isn’t what you might think. As I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, it’s not the show’s humor, which became vastly more hit-or-miss in that four year stretch. It’s not the characters, who grew more and more flat and caricatured under Scully’s reign. It’s not the stories, which became ever more disjointed and rambling. And it’s not even the extra zaniness, which frayed whatever remained of the series’s thin tether to reality.

It’s the laziness, the sloppiness, the sense that the people making what had once been the greatest television show of all time had just kind of stopped caring.

I don’t level that charge lightly. When it comes time to write a bad review, I try to malign results rather than motives. Most art is made by well-intentioned folks who may fall short of their marks, but who still mean well and aim high. I hate to declare, with all my critic’s hubris, that the fault is not in our stars, but in the people writing for them.

But the alternative is that showrunner Mike Scully, legendary Simpsons scribe John Swartzwelder, and a writers’ room with past and future showrunners, tried as hard as possible and still produced a steaming pile of hippo dung like “Simpsons Safari.” Calling their effort lackadaisical feels far kinder.

The episode sees Homer inciting a bag boy strike, hunting for vittles when that results in a town-wide food shortage, winning a free trip to Africa from a forty-year-old box of animal crackers, aimlessly insulting the poorly-amalgamated culture of the continent, running into a thinly-veiled ersatz Jane Goodall, and uncovering a secret conspiracy to have chimps mine diamonds. Some Simpsons episodes sound nuts on paper but are glorious in the execution. For “Simpsons Safari”, though, that description, if anything, undersells the car crash of random, unfunny nonsense that fuels the episode.

Who among us hasn't found ourselves haranguing a minimum wage employee with a baguette? Relatable!

“Simpsons Safari” quickly turns into one giant wacky cartoon. If you want to see animals acting more like characters from Looney Tunes than real creatures, then you’ve come to the right place. Bees become ammo for blow darts. Rhino randomly emerge from oversized eggs. Leeches the size of swordfish pop out of rivers. Hippos and warthogs go wholly unnoticed until the plot needs them to be seen. And chimps chat with one another about diamond-mining and opine on sensible ponytails. Sometimes, “Simpsons Safari” is, in true Swartzwelder style, banking on the self-conscious absurdity of its own setups. But the writers go to that well so many times that it feels like a cheap excuse not to write any gags that actually fit the situation.

And that’s before you get to non-zoological nonsense that permeates “Simpsons Safari”. The entire Simpson family inexplicably swings from a vine, Tarzan style, in the episode. They survive plummeting off a waterfall by landing in a giant flower. They fend off a pack of interlopers by using coconuts like Molotov cocktails, as though this were some woe begotten episode of Gilligan’s Island. It’s not as though The Simpsons hasn’t stretched its self-described “elastic reality” for the sake of a gag before, but this episode is all reality-stretching gags, and that tack quickly becomes utterly exhausting.

But even when “Simpsons Safari” isn’t veering into the unbelievable or the overly cartoony, so much of its humor here is just plain lame. One scene ends with an awkward aside about how big Homer’s behind is. Later, he and Bart miss a high five and smack each other in the face in a bit of slapstick so uninspired, it likely made Bart’s beloved Three Stooges roll in their graves. Twice in the same act, the episode spends an extended amount of time on jokes about a house smelling like feces and a monkey wiping its butt on a tree. I am not one to turn up my nose at scatological humor or physical comedy, but there’s no cleverness to these gags. The Simpsons just wants to remind you that poop exists and call it a day.

The chief provider of those fecal reminders is Homer himself, who is absolutely abysmal here. The infamous “Jerkass Homer” is out in full force in “Simpsons Safari”, with the character being unreasonable and rude to the grocery store bag boys for no reason, declaring his superiority over an old fossil with disdain for his tour guide, and trying to force Bart to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. His idiocy becomes so overblown that he takes a map from a box of animal crackers to mean that the river he’s floating on doesn’t exist. He’s become such a bad parent that he tells his kids they’re hopelessly lost and going to die, and that being eaten by a crocodile is just like falling asleep in a blender.

"I think Homer gets stupider every year." - Prof. Lawrence Pierce of the University of Chicago

It’s not that Homer doesn’t have his funny moments in this episode. His faux pearl of wisdom about poachers is amusingly misguided. Some of his grocery store jerkism works as a nice mini-satire of the “customer is always right” mentality. And god help me, I even enjoy the meta humor of him continuing to bring up the bag boy strike long after most first act premises have been forgotten on The Simpsons. But this is as good an example as you’re likely to find of Homer having drifted away from being the dim but well-meaning Simpson family patriarch, to becoming a full blown Captain Wacky who only exists to get hurt and be an utter asshole to anyone with the misfortune of running into him.

Then there are the parts of the episode that are downright offensive. “Simpsons Safari” traffics in only the shallowest stereotypes about African life and culture, resorting to lazy bits about coups, murderous fauna, and depictions of the continent’s citizens as primitive tribespeople. (And if you have qualms about Hank Azaria doing a South Asian accent, you’ll love him voicing an African man using only the vaguest of dialects.)  Homer sings nonsense words to imitate the local language; Bart and Lisa get lip discs and neck rings, and Tanzania’s President comes to power via a series of smotherings. The most polite word that comes to mind about all of this is “yeesh.”

In fairness, this sort of thing is nothing new for The Simpsons. The show approached visits to Australia and Japan with roughly the same depth of knowledge and level of sensitivity. But there’s zero self-reflection about it here, with no effort to make the gags specific to individual countries or cultures within a massive and diverse continent. Instead, the show just coasts on a series of gags that homogenize and caricature African culture to the point that it feels like a cross between an elementary school joke book and the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article.

The episode’s writers have commented that all (or at least most) of this was part of a deliberate effort to cheese off fans who wanted the show to be realistic. Well, bravo to those distinguished gentlemen. The series’s writers have surely proven once and for all that cartoons don’t have to be 100% realistic. But they do, unfortunately, still have to be funny. If the best you can come up with on that front is broad overgeneralizations about a whole continent or the thousandth “gee, ain’t this wacky?”-style gag, then it doesn’t matter whether your take on reality feels closer to John Cassavetes or Tex Avery.

Did you know that hippos are not only afraid of water, but actually whimper like dogs when they encounter it?

Even the best gags in “Simpsons Safari” tend to be redos of other bits The Simpsons has done before. The local spirit-leader (already a dicey setup) who senses a great evil after Homer declares that “The Simpsons are going to Africa” is a decent laugh, but it’s a variation on Marge’s unexplained shudder in “Bart Carny.” Bart cautioning that they should check Dr. Bushwell’s research before condemning her is an amusing enough out-of-character moment, but it’s essentially the same gag as Marge wondering why she can’t be greedy once in a while in “Rosebud.” Even the fork in the river with welcoming and foreboding options is a repeat from “Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood”. After a show enters its second decade on the air, some repetition is inevitable, but these bits speak to the sense of a desultory recycling of ideas that infects this episode.

That comes full circle with the episode’s ending, where the “poachers” attacking the erstwhile chimp preserve are revealed to be Greenpeace activists, and the Jane Goodall knockoff is exposed as operating a monkey-run diamond mine. It’s not quite a “Jockey Elves”-level of completely bonkers drivel as far as stupid endings go, but it’s damn close. This insanity is all supposed to be okay, mind you, because Dr. Bushwell just bribes the family with diamonds, and before you know it, the Simpsons are all flying home, having learned and accomplished nothing.

I ask you — what is the point this episode? What is the point of anything within it? Is it to dunk on Jane Goodall for some reason? Is to take the stuffing out of bag boys? Is it just an excuse for the show to spin its wheels for twenty-two minutes while it presents another poorly mad-libbed “the Simpsons are going to ____” outing?

Maybe it's just to put the Simpson family in another set out jaunty new outfits.

The harsh truth is that “Simpsons Safari” has no reason to exist. It has no plot. It has no point. And even taken as a disconnected series of riffs on this and that, it has almost no good laughs either. The episode is a heap of random, sometimes offensive, mostly unfunny filler, clumped together without vision or purpose, meant for no one but network timekeepers who simply demand that something occupy the airwaves between ads and fulfill the station’s contractual obligations.

Or so I hope. The alternative is that a group of creative people — who had been a part of some of this all-time great series’s very best episodes — had so lost whatever bit of magic it takes to create such brilliance that they made their best effort here and still produced this unsightly waste of time and space. For all of this episode’s gags about African heads of state playing musical chairs, after four years under Mike Scully, “Simpsons Safari” is an episode-length demand for regime change at The Simpsons, if only to ensure that such failing, feckless efforts never saw the light of day ever again.

Odds and Ends

– For all my griping, the first act of this episode, while still roundly pointless, at least has some decent chuckles in it. Homer and the kids’ self-justifying grocery store indulgences, Maggie’s fearful expression over Syrian hardliners, and Lenny’s efforts to secure provisions for a casual get-together are all passable Simpsons buffoonery at worst.

– I’ll also admit that while the weird animal gags don’t really work for me here, Santa’s Little Helper having the wherewithal to misdirect the family when he smells the animal crackers, and to gnaw on Homer’s leg when his plan is thwarted, got a mild laugh out of me.

– Similarly, the Cheetah perspective gag is funny enough to pass muster, despite not being particularly realistic, if only because it feels vaguely Buster Keaton-esque.

– It’s a dark joke to be sure, but Homer’s remark of “Africa, they’re bound to have food there!” is the closest thing to an incisive and/or pointed gag this episode can boast.

– As much of a head-scratcher as the “Dr. Bushwell is secretly a chimp diamond-miner” reveal is, the Paul Simon reference to “diamonds on the soles of her shoes” is a minor salve to the whole thing.

– To paraphrase Homer himself: “Alright, we’re here — now let us never speak of ‘Simpsons Safari’ again.”