“The Simpsons” was a beloved animated sitcom that ran for ten legendary seasons and concluded in 1999. The show was celebrated for what was widely perceived as a near perfect run that wrapped before it wore out its concept and overstayed its welcome. Creator Matt Groening and showrunner James L. Brooks famously decided to bring the show to a conclusion after experiencing the negative audience reaction to the season 9 episode “The Principal and the Pauper,” in which it was revealed that the school’s principal was actually an impostor who had stolen the real Seymour Skinner’s identity. Brooks did not want to sully the show’s legacy by doing a bunch of weird episodes as the franchise slid into mediocrity and cultural irrelevance, so the writers and cast decided instead to go out on top and end things on a high note. However, because of its centrality in 90s pop culture, a long-running Internet joke is to pretend “The Simpsons” is still on the air, a premise that gets more absurd and deranged with each passing year. If this show were still producing new episodes, it would be in its 38th season now, and most of the voice cast would be in their 80s. The joke is to imagine how distorted this charming show would have become if it had been stretched out to more than 800 episodes. Comedy posters on “weird Twitter” used to try to top each other by making up terrible ideas for what modern episodes of the show might be like. For example, a viral 2012 tweet imagined an episode where Lady Gaga helps Lisa Simpson with her self esteem. In 2019, popular shitposter Megan Amram originated the premise of Bart Simpson becoming a men’s rights activist to protest a gender-swapped reboot of “Itchy and Scratchy.” But perhaps the most elaborate Internet “Simpsons” joke was a 2017 YouTube mockumentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu ironically pretended to be offended by the charming and innocuous convenience store owner character Apu. Everyone thought this was hilarious, especially since the show had been off the air for nearly two decades when the mockumentary was released. So, Twitter ran with the joke by pretending to “cancel” Apu, and the viral gag memorably resulted in the character’s voice actor, Hank Azaria, recognizing the meme by promising never to perform the character again, which everybody thought was really funny since Azaria had been retired for years. Now, nearly a decade later, fans are pretending that the show — which has now been off the air longer than most people tweeting about it have been alive— has brought back the “cancelled” character with a new racially-appropriate voice actor. I actually don’t think this is that funny, and I kind of think the gag of pretending “The Simpsons” is still airing new episodes has overstayed its welcome, a mistake the actual show “The Simpsons” would never have made. If you haven’t seen this 1990s classic, which — and I cannot emphasize this enough — ended after 10 seasons in 1999, you can watch all the episodes on Disney+ (except the one with Michael Jackson that got pulled from streaming).

Abbott & Costello - Who's on First Pure comedic genius

Breaking news: The firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be live-streamed, the Defense Department said. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. wapo.st/4hNxK0C

A poem by Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read it in full: newyorker.com/magazine/2001/…

Congratulations to Anne Carson on receiving the 2026 #NobelPrize in Literature. Carson taught at Princeton University in the 1980s and was recently on campus to deliver the 2025 Fagles Lecture: bit.ly/3TteJZj

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This is a disaster for the human race and I’ve really lost patience with the useless morons who can’t see that. An AI video chat that passes for human has no necessary legitimate applications. It will be used to scam old people out of their life savings. Lonely, mentally vulnerable people are going to form romantic attachments to people who aren’t real. Isolation will increase. Mental illness will skyrocket even more than it already has. Kids in grade school will have AI boyfriends and girlfriends. All of this will happen. And worse things we can’t even conceive at this point. People are already forming unhealthy emotional attachments to text-based LLMs. Once there’s an audio and visual component, it’s over. Millions of brains will be broken irreparably. The benefits of this technology, whatever they are exactly, are so vastly outweighed by the societal catastrophe it will cause, and is already causing, that you can’t even measure the two categories on the same scale. But at least this is the best thing that ever happened to third world scammers. So if you’re in that community, congratulations.