Animated satire and collective memory: reflecting on the American “history wars” with The Simpsons

1 Introduction

Democratic societies around the world have witnessed a “memory boom” in recent decades, characterized by heated public debates over how to collectively remember the historical past. This phenomenon is partly driven by identity politics, which pit different social groups against each other over “who owns the past and how it ought to be represented” (Blight 2009: 246). In the United States, the question of how to interpret the Founding Fathers – that is, the political leaders who helped win the War of Independence, crafted the U.S. constitution, and filled key government positions during the early years of the republic – has become a primary battleground in the “history wars” (Engelhardt and Linenthal 1996) between conservatives and liberals. Whereas the political right strives to show that the Founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation, secular groups advance a narrative of the Founders intentionally embracing a “wall of separation” between church and state. Meanwhile, multiculturalists advocate a “history from the bottom” perspective that seeks to redeem “the humanity of people previously swept away by traditional historical narratives that focused on the role of powerful white men” (Hartman 2015: 254). Hence, multiculturalist narratives draw attention to the Founding Fathers’ role in sustaining the enslavement of Black people – both as slave owners and as crafters of the constitution.

Different representations of America’s historical past are underpinned by competing political interests (cf. Berger 2012: 22–23; Wertsch 2002: 31–33). For example, portraying the writers of the constitution as devout Christians helps justify legislation that restricts women’s access to abortion, whereas narratives of the Founding Fathers as secular men support the protection of abortion rights. However, as various commentators have pointed out (e.g., Blight 2021; Kirsch 2022), the history wars are increasingly detached from practical policy questions, but instead operate mainly in the realm of emotion. Debates over how to remember the Founding Fathers – and the nation’s past more generally – have become highly polarized and antagonistic, which makes it increasingly difficult to solve the underlying political conflicts that gave rise to these debates in the first place.

It is in the context of America’s bitter memory politics, as I will argue in this paper, that The Simpsons offers the persona of Jebediah Springfield – the founder of the eponymous fictional town in which the show is set – as a satirical device to ridicule conflictual processes of collective remembering, with the aim to open up space for critical reflection and more productive discussion. Designed as a metaphor of the Founding Fathers, Jebediah Springfield allows The Simpsons to engage audiences in an absurd imitation of the hyper-polarized and emotionally charged history wars that mocks both conservative and liberal positions.

More generally, I put forward the argument that animated satire offers distinct rhetorical devices to draw attention to the operating mechanisms of collective remembering. While existing scholarship has variously considered how mass media produce memory, my case study of The Simpsons demonstrates that animated satire can enable audiences to reflect on the construction and maintenance of collective memory.

2 The memory-reflexive function of animated satire

Collective memory “refers to the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about the past” (Schwartz 2015: 10). Because “societies do not have a brain” (Neiger 2020: 2), the formation and maintenance of collective memory is necessarily exteriorized. As Wertsch explains, collective memory, “instead of being grounded in direct, immediate experience of events … is based on ‘textual resources’ provided by others” (2002: 5).

This exteriorized reconstruction of the historical past creates space for competition and negotiation between different “memory entrepreneurs” (Conway 2010: 446). Collective remembering becomes a “dynamic, complex, and often conflicted process in which diverse and at times divergent groups dialogically engage with each other over the present meaning of our shared pasts” (Houdek and Phillips 2017: 3). While the state tends to employ its extraordinary control over cultural resources – such as the education system, museums, and commemorative events – to perpetuate a single “master narrative” of the historical past, it is important to highlight that such narratives are typically the outcome of political bargaining between different memory entrepreneurs, reflecting the relative power that these actors bring to the bargaining process (Berger 2012: 22). The media, meanwhile, not only provide a platform for memory entrepreneurs to participate in public debates over how collective pasts should be narrated and understood, but media outlets may also act as memory agents themselves, producing their own readings of the historical past (Neiger et al. 2011: 10).

While existing scholarship has doubtlessly improved our understanding of how the media contribute to the construction of collective memories,^[1] one particular genre remains under-researched: satire. Certainly, a small number of studies have shown how satire helps social groups overcome traumatic events (e.g., Sheftel 2012; Zandberg 2015) and others have investigated the mnemonic functions of concepts that are closely related to satire, such as humor (e.g., Smirnova 2014) and parody (e.g., Setka 2015). However, satire sets itself apart as a distinct form of social commentary in that it combines four characteristics: aggression, play, laughter, and judgment (Test 1991). Among these properties, the one that most readily distinguishes satire from other types of political humor is the broader target of aggression. As Caufield explains (2008: 10; emphasis added), “conventional political humor is often geared at making the audience laugh at others, while satire is designed to make the audience laugh at itself as well as others, therefore allowing the audiences to realize a larger set of systemic faults.” Because of the broader target of attack, satire is able “to engage its audience in a more critical and cognitively engaging political and social experience” (Becker 2020: 274).

Most commonly, the satirist employs the technique of exaggeration, which typically involves replicating elements of a real-world situation before exaggerating them to amplify the absurdity of the original (Park-Ozee 2019: 589). Building on the mechanism of incongruity, absurdity falls into one of the three traditional theories of humor alongside relief and superiority. According to incongruity theory, “humor results from a mental reaction to something unexpected, unusual, or odd in a nonthreatening way when an accepted norm or pattern is violated” (Meyer 2015: 17). Specifically, humor is experienced when the audience “resolves” or “makes sense of” the incongruity between two scripts that intersect with each other: a first (conventional) script, which sets up expectations as to how things will (or should) unfold, and a second script, which does not conform to the predictions evoked by the first script (Young 2017: 875–876).

Broadly speaking, satire scholarship can be divided into two camps: the effects perspective, which examines the cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral consequences of exposure to satire, and the features approach, which engages in a close reading of satire not only to reveal textual strategies, but also to discuss whether (and in what ways) satire contributes to the health of democratic public culture (Becker and Waisanen 2013). In this paper, I will adopt the latter to show how animated satire can be employed with the aim to shake audiences into awareness and encourage them to critically consider processes of collective remembering. Hence, while existing scholarship has revealed how media contribute to the production of collective memories, my paper shows that animated satire provides a medium of critical reflection upon the construction of collective memories.^[2]

Animated satire sets itself apart from other satire subgenres in a number of ways – not least because animation carries with it certain audience expectations (Higgs 2019; Mittell 2001). To begin with, expectations regarding the artificiality of the animated medium provide ample space to play with plausibility. Even though absurdity is a key defining attribute of satire generally, animated satire – due to the fact that the audience’s disbelief is already suspended – can crank up the absurdity dial much more than other forms of satire (Caufield 2008: 11; Gray 2006: 66–67). Additionally, because animation is most commonly used in entertainment targeted at children, audiences expect content to be “cartoony” and “childish.” In the case of animated satire, this ingrained expectation helps to soften the blow of the satirist’s judgmental attacks (Gray 2006: 67; Thompson 2009: 44). Most importantly, the childlike nature of animated satire motivates critical reflection by placing political and social issues in a context that allows audiences to consider them from a more removed position.

However, notwithstanding that animation has “a sense of unreality built into its DNA” (Higgs 2019: 93), animated satire can in many ways be more real than live action. In particular, scholars have highlighted the realism of animated sitcoms, such as The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, American Dad, and King of the Hill. These shows draw on traditional sitcom genre conventions, but use postmodern textual strategies to transcend genre boundaries and deliver satirical social commentary (Gray 2006). They derive their realism primarily from the fact that “animation allows for a much broader and more vivid world than live action” (Feltmate 2017: 3). Writing about The Simpsons, Crawford observes that “the … family is free to roam around the fictional town of Springfield, allowing for a wider range of situations and larger number of characters than are available to any live-action situation comedy without a massive budget” (2009: 54; also see Booker 2006: 53–55; Henry 2012: 46).

Based on these theoretical claims about animated satire, I will argue in the remainder of the paper that The Simpsons employs the commemoration of Jebediah Springfield – the founder of the eponymous fictional town in which the show is set – as a satirical vehicle to critically reflect on processes of collective remembering, in particular in relation to the Founding Fathers. The Simpsons has been described as “a knowing and sharp satire upon the complex, excessive, hypocritical, and often idiotic state of contemporary American culture” (Henry 2012: 7). Consistent with the definition of satire offered earlier, The Simpsons not only attacks political elites and institutions, but also offers harsh criticism of the “uninformed, irrational, and disengaged American public” (Guehlstorf et al. 2008: 212).

It should further be noted that memory is a recurring theme in The Simpsons. To begin with, when viewed as a parodic riff on the traditional American family sitcom, it becomes obvious that The Simpsons not only regularly mocks the genre’s “reset rule,” but also departs from this convention “by providing overarching narrative elements and memory” (Fink 2019: 73).^[3] For example, “flashback” episodes develop a (not necessarily coherent) backstory for the main characters, and Grampa’s inconsistent and (seemingly) inflated wartime stories can be understood as a humorous take on inter-generational relations (Figure 1). What is more, “anthology” episodes allow the writers to cast Springfield’s citizens as prominent historical figures, thereby “offering alternative readings” (Ezell 2016: 42) of history – for example, of the Pilgrims’ journey on the Mayflower (“The Wettest Stories Ever Told,” s17e18).

Figure 1:

Grampa reminisces about the war. From the episode “Let’s Go Fly a Coot” (s26e20). ©20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved/courtesy Everett Collection.

While research under the effects paradigm predominantly relies on experimental designs to analyze how audiences respond to satire, my case study of The Simpsons employs qualitative methods of textual analysis to decode “the author’s intention as well as his or her specific rationale for the creation of a text” (Brennen 2017: 210). This qualitative approach is in line with existing features scholarship on satire as well as with much of the literature on collective memory (see Conway 2010).

3 Jebediah Springfield as a metaphor of the Founding Fathers

4 The emotions of the history wars: “Your hero phobia sickens me!”

Through the persona of Jebediah Springfield, the Simpsons writers encourage audiences to playfully consider why the history wars have spiraled into an emotionally loaded conflict that makes a reasoned debate about how to narrate America’s historical past impossible. Ridiculing humor, which is indiscriminately directed at both conservatives and liberals, results from incongruity between two scripts: a first script that sets normative expectations as to how the story should unfold and a second (highly absurd) script that contradicts these expectations. Audiences can resolve the incongruous situation by reflecting on how both sides – groups attacking the reputation of historical figures and groups defending their heroes – are to blame for escalating the history wars.

In “The Telltale Head,” Bart befriends the school bullies Jimbo, Kearny, and Dolph. One day, as they hang out in the park, they begin to recognize shapes in the clouds. Eventually, a cloud floats by that looks like the statue of Jebediah without the head. “I wish someone really would cut his ugly head off,” Jimbo blurts out. Kearny and Dolph agree, but Bart is not so sure. “Don’t you remember history class?” he asks. “Jebediah once killed a bear with his bare hands.” The three bullies respond with ridicule and tell Bart to “beat it.”

After leaving the park, Bart again walks past the statue of Jebediah. While staring at the bronze town founder, the bullies’ mocking laughter replays in his head. Suddenly, he has an “Aha!” moment. He runs home where he asks Homer whether “you could do stuff that you think is pretty bad so other kids will like you better.” Homer checks that he is “not talking about killing anyone” and gives him permission to “run along.” The scene cuts to three in the morning and Bart – dressed in a black ninja suit – sneaks out of the house. Under cover of darkness, he makes his way to the town square where he pulls out a hacksaw and cuts off Jebediah’s head.

It is at this point that a second script, which had silently been sitting in the background, openly intersects with the first script. The first script sets up the normative expectation that the town should forgive ten-year-old Bart for his prank – in particular, since it was encouraged by bad parenting from Homer. However, the second script runs against these expectations: the citizens respond as if Bart had actually killed someone.

When the Simpsons family gathers for breakfast the next morning, the radio reports the “act of senseless vandalism.” The town is shocked, even the reporter is unable to hold back his tears.

Bart: It’s just a statue.

Marge: The statue of the trailblazing founder of our town!

Lisa: It’s a symbol of what we can all do if we put our minds to it.

Homer: Just a statue?! Is the Statue of Liberty just a statue? Is the Leaning Tower of Pizza just a statue?

At the Springfield retirement home, Grampa cannot contain his outrage: “I hope they find the punk who did this! And I hope they cut his head off!” Krusty the Clown pleads with children to turn in the culprit: “I don’t care if it’s your brother, your sister, your daddy, or your mommy!” Even Jimbo, Kerny and Dolph want to find the vandal, so they can “break every bone in his stupid little body!”

Slowly, the guilt eats away at Bart and he decides to confess. He goes to find Homer and Marge in the living room where they are watching a TV documentary educating viewers that Jebediah killed a bear “with his bare hands. That’s B-A-R-E hands. Although modern historians recently uncovered evidence that the bear, in fact, probably killed him.” After first responding with anger, his parents agree to take the “head thing” back to the authorities. On the way there Bart and Homer run into a torch-wielding mob that chases them into the town square. The enraged crowd is only appeased when Bart places the head back on Jebediah’s statue.

The task of resolving the incongruity between the first (normative) and the second (contradicting) scripts encourages viewers to reflect on how social groups often respond with disproportionate anger when their historical heroes are – literally or figuratively – toppled from their pedestals. While making it clear that the citizens of Springfield regard Jebediah as the personification of their beliefs and self-conception, and thus exhibiting some empathy for the citizens, the Simpsons writers ultimately mock the reaction to Bart’s prank as too emotional and hysterical. Moreover, in line with incongruity theory, audiences are invited to reinterpret the first script in light of the second script (Young 2017: 876). This allows viewers to reflect on how Bart – as an allegory of the attacking side in the history wars – is partly responsible for the escalation. What the Simpsons writers draw attention to is that attacks on historical heroes can have a particularly antagonizing effect when the attack is motivated by the objective to merely provoke the defending side – what Demetriou and Wingo (2018: 350) refer to as the “capture the flag” mindset. Bart beheaded Jebediah’s statue because he knew that this would cause public upset.

The “Lisa the Iconoclast” episode centers around Springfield’s bicentennial celebration. The students in Lisa’s class receive an assignment that requires them to write an essay about the town founder. After school, Lisa heads down to the Springfield Historical Society to begin her research. When the friendly curator, Hollis Hurlbut, leaves her unattended, Lisa takes a closer look at some of Jebediah’s belongings and finds a handwritten note hidden inside a fife:

Lisa: The secret confessions of Jebediah Springfield?

Jebediah: Know ye who read this, there is more to my life than history records. … I have not always been known as Jebediah Springfield. Until 1796, I was Hans Sprungfeld, murderous pirate. And the half-wits of this town will never learn the truth.

Lisa: Oh, my God! Our town hero is a fraud!

Lisa puts the note back in the fife when she hears Hurlbut return, but after leaving the museum she dives into a pile of history books to corroborate the content of the note. Among other evidence that seems to prove the authenticity of the note, she comes across an account of Sprungfeld trying to steal from and kill George Washington in 1781.

A first normative script is firmly established in this moment: Lisa presents credible evidence that Jebediah had a dark past as a pirate, people should at least listen to what she has to say. However, as the episode progresses, a second script emerges that runs against this expectation: rather than triggering a healthy public debate, the eight-year-old’s revelations are met with backlash and shunning from the Springfield community. Not only does Lisa fail the school assignment (“Lisa, for your essay ‘Jebediah Springfield: Super-Fraud,’ F!”), but the town’s bicentennial committee warns her not to investigate further (“You are tampering with forces you can’t understand.”) and strips Homer of his role as town crier. Her campaign to distribute “WANTED FOR TREASON” posters has her thrown out of the local Kwik-E-Mart and Moe’s Tavern (“Your hero phobia sickens me!”). Even Marge launches into a defensive rant: “When my family first came to this state, they had a choice of living in Springfield or Stenchburg. You know why they chose Springfield? Because everyone knows Jebediah Springfield was a true American hero, end of story!”

Audiences can resolve the incongruity between the two scripts by drawing parallels with the “real world” history wars. Springfield’s ridiculous response to the revelations about Jebediah is an exaggerated, but nevertheless easily understood, analogy of how social groups shut down debate when confronted with new information that threatens to tarnish their heroes’ reputation. However, the Simpsons writers blame such breakdowns of deliberation not just on emotionally immature responses on the defending side, but they also pin some of the responsibility on the attacking side. Specifically, by encouraging a reinterpretation of the first script through the frame of the second script, the writers want viewers to understand that both Springfield’s citizens and Lisa are guilty of adopting a “globalist” view of admiration (see Archer and Matheson 2022: 20). That is to say, both sides reduce Jebediah to a particular feature – his admirable and immoral features, respectively. Hence, Lisa ends up provoking anger and resistance because, against the background of blind hero worship in the community, she paints the town founder as a pure villain, ignoring all the good things that Jebediah did for Springfield after giving up piracy. She describes the town founder as “one of the evilest men of the 1780s” and fervently preaches to a captive audience at Moe’s Tavern: “Jebediah Springfield was nothing more than an evil, bloodthirsty pirate who hated this town!”

The “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say D’oh” episode begins at the local theater where Marge and other Springfield citizens are rehearsing for a community production of Oklahoma! – a musical that has been attacked by critics for presenting a romanticized version of the western frontier and concealing “America’s shameful treatment of its indigenous populations” (Knapp 2005: 124). The rehearsals soon break down when the actors get increasingly irritated by the director’s excessive and constant criticism. After showing him the door, they choose Marge as the new director, because – as Lenny, one of the cast members, puts it – “Marge makes us all feel good about ourselves.”

Back at home with her family, Marge mulls over ideas for a new musical. When Homer suggests that “the best kind of original show is one that rips off a big hit,” they decide to take inspiration from Hamilton. “All right, who is our Alexander Hamilton?” asks Lisa. After a very long pause, which also gives audiences time to think about the answer, Lisa gasps: “Jebediah Springfield! I’ll write a musical biography, warts and all!”

Lisa’s “warts and all” promise lays down the script of what should happen in the rest of the episode. As regular and attentive viewers of The Simpsons know, Jebediah was once a “murderous pirate” called Hans Sprungfeld. Hence, any musical biography that claims to portray the founder of Springfield in a truthful way has to acknowledge Jebediah’s piracy past. Lisa appears to double down on her “warts and all” promise when they have a first meeting with the community theater group to discuss the new play.

Marge: Our new production will be “Bloody Bloody Jebediah,” a hip-hop musical about our city’s founder.

Sideshow Mel: Is it respectful?

Lisa: Not entirely.

Sideshow Mel: WHAT?!

After Marge and Lisa overcome numerous challenges that seem out of proportion for a community production, the day of the musical’s premiere arrives – and a second contradictory script presents itself to the viewers. Even though Jebediah proclaims in the opening song that “tonight my secrets are revealed,” the musical contains no references to his life as a pirate. All Jebediah admits is that he “didn’t fight for equal rights” and wishes he had “done more for non-whites.”

The key to resolving the incongruity between the two scripts is this: the “Bloody Bloody Jebediah” musical sanitizes the town founder’s past, as Marge and Lisa understand that audiences want to consume content that makes them feel good about themselves. The community production of Oklahoma! collapsed because the actors, who had been cast from among Springfield citizens, felt they were being criticized too much. Hence, in order not to offend audiences (and the actors), the Jebediah musical – much like the plot of Oklahoma! – whitewashes the historical past. Put differently, the Simpsons writers make fun of the viewers themselves who – as the consumers of popular entertainment – hinder informed debate about the historical past by avoiding mediated collective memories that may trigger feelings of guilt and shame, and instead seek out mediated memories that feed their need for emotional comfort.

5 Defusing the history wars: “Hooray for snakes!”

While the episodes discussed so far enable audiences to reflect on how affect and emotions prevent a sober conversation about how to narrate America’s past, the “Whacking Day” episode provides a “template” for how to defuse the history wars.

The story starts off with Bart getting expelled from school after taking groundskeeper Willie’s tractor for a joyride and running down the superintendent. Later, Bart and Lisa watch the local TV news reporting on the upcoming holiday. The report opens with a historical photograph of Jebediah Springfield, depicting the town founder as he takes a swing at a snake with the butt of his gun. This is followed by black and white footage from the mid-1900s that shows hordes of citizens clubbing snakes to death on a previous Whacking Day. Lisa is disgusted by the cruelty inflicted upon the snakes: “It’s all so barbaric.”

The scene of Bart and Lisa watching TV introduces viewers to the first script. The normative proposition that is put forward is that Whacking Day should be abolished. The TV producers saw it necessary to add a “file footage” label to the historical film material, which implies that – although animal ethics have progressed considerably since the post-World War II period – Whacking Day has not changed for decades. Even “a panel of hillbillies,” as the report notes, called the holiday “distasteful and puerile.” However, as the episode progresses, viewers become aware of a second script: Springfield is swept away by Whacking Day fever. Only Bart and Lisa maintain a critical perspective on the holiday.

Bart, having been expelled from school, is home-schooled by Marge who assigns him to read Johnny Tremain – a fictional historical novel about a teenage boy who joins the Patriot movement in colonial America. The book seemingly ignites a revolutionary spark in Bart, as he spends the rest of the episode questioning authority and conventional wisdom. Not only does he call out an inconsistency in the heroic story of Jebediah during a tour of Olde Springfield Town, but he also reads a book by investigative journalist Bod Woodward titled “The Truth about Whacking Day,” through which he learns that Whacking Day is nothing but a myth; in reality, the holiday “was started in 1924, as an excuse to beat up the Irish.”

In the end, Bart and Lisa come up with a plan to sabotage Whacking Day. Making use of the fact that snakes respond to vibrations, they lure the animals into their house by playing bass-heavy music. This incites an angry mob of citizens that descends on Evergreen Terrace. However, Bart and Lisa are able to calm down the enraged crowd, not only by informing them that the holiday is a “sham,” but also by appealing to their empathy and reminding them of all the good things that snakes have done for them. The mood swings from angry to happy and the crowd breaks out into impromptu “Hooray for snakes!” chants.

Audiences can resolve the incongruous events of the story if they critically reflect on citizens’ role as the “consumers” of collective memories. The Whacking Day holiday goes ahead – despite the flagrant cruelty against animals – because citizens passively absorb reconstructions of the historical past presented to them by the mass media and other memory entrepreneurs. Only Lisa and Bart scrutinize the messages in a more involved way. While Lisa, as the embodiment of countercultural ideals in The Simpsons (Fink 2019; Turner 2004), generally rejects much of what the media and other cultural institutions spew out, Bart’s punk character receives an intellectual boost of sorts by being home-schooled – that is, outside the public education system.

What is more, the “Whacking Day” episode charts a course towards resolving emotionally loaded conflicts over how to remember the past. To begin with, the Simpsons writers suggest that collective memories of historical heroes should only be challenged when these representations obscure or downplay injustices. One reason why Lisa’s campaign to expose Jebediah as a pirate in “Lisa the Iconoclast” provoked an antagonistic reaction from the community was that Lisa merely sought to reveal the truth for the truth’s sake; she did not seek to remedy any wrongs done to members of a marginalized group. For all we know, Hans Sprungfeld only stole from the rich landowning (and slave-owning) elite, such as George Washington – that is, social groups that were (and continue to be) politically and economically privileged. In contrast, the myth of the Whacking Day holiday endorses the subordination of groups that are presently or were historically subject to victimization (in this case, snakes).

Further, the episode proposes that heroic representations of historical figures need to be challenged in a way that can overcome emotional resistances and disavowals. For one, this involves fostering an empathetic understanding of the experiences of those groups that have been harmed by the community’s historic injustice. In addition, the Simpsons writers give viewers to understand that heroic representations can be revised without necessarily purging the historical figure from collective memory. In contrast to the globalist vilification of Jebediah in “Lisa the Iconoclast,” Bart and Lisa only attack the particular part of the Jebediah narrative that expresses disregard for the lives of a derogated group: the Whacking Day myth.

6 Conclusion

Based on a case study of The Simpsons, this paper has sought to show that animated satire provides distinct rhetorical techniques to encourage critical reflection on the politics of memory. The textual analysis – by applying incongruity theory – reveals that space for reflection opens up when viewers become aware of an intersection between a first (normative) script and second (absurd and contradicting) script. Animated satire maximizes the opportunity for reflection not only because audience expectations make it possible to push the absurdity of the second script to an extreme, but also because the “childlish” connotations soften the satirist’s critique. At the same time, the unlimited freedom of animation means that the politics of collective remembering can be imitated with a high degree of realism.

While the Simpsons writers deploy the persona of Jebediah Springfield as a metaphor of the Founding Fathers to mock the constructed nature of our collective memories, they also propose that constructions of historical heroes play an important role in providing communities with a shared sense of identity. At the end of “Lisa the Iconoclast,” even Lisa recognizes that “the myth of Jebediah has value too,” which leads her to abandon her campaign to expose the town founder as a pirate. What is more, the character of Jebediah invites audiences to reflect on why public debates over how to remember the Founding Fathers – and America’s historical past more generally – have spiraled into an emotionally charged, hyper-polarized conflict. A thread that runs through all Jebediah episodes is the simplistic view of history that is promoted by memory entrepreneurs and the mass media. Disagreements over how to narrate the nation’s past descend into binary arguments, because there is little willingness to embrace the complexities of history or to accept historical figures as “a messy mix of good and bad traits” (Archer and Matheson 2022: 83). Instead, characters of the past are often divided into crude categories, such as “Christians” and “secularists” or “goodies” and “baddies.” And, to further fuel the fires of the history wars, attempts to revise the reputations of historical figures are typically not delivered in a way that would overcome emotional resistances from social groups who see these figures as moral beacons and as representations of their core beliefs.

By encouraging reflection on the conflictual processes of collective remembering, The Simpsons not only makes audiences aware of their own role in perpetuating and reproducing collective memories, but it also equips them with the critical skills needed to recognize the types of rhetorical claims that escalate the history wars. In doing so, The Simpsons seeks to generate better debates about America’s historical past, in the hope to shift the focus back onto the underlying political disagreements that gave rise to these debates in the first place.