Children of Springfield

Well, after months of wait and delay, this was somewhat disappointingly, or at least unexpectedly, empty. I'm still mulling it over, but Slant may have it right.

On the other hand, the new trailer for The Simpsons movie is not only inexplicably hilarious, but provides a perfect corollary to A.O. Scott's delightful NYT Magazine essay on physical comedy. I don't think I could really effectively explain why I cracked up at seeing Homer slammed back and forth like that (although the ludicrously obvious literalization of "a rock and a hard place" certainly adds a lot), but Scott's description of the minivan gag in Little Miss Sunshine seems appropriate:

The gag is executed again and again, and it never gets old. There is nothing in it that needs to be explained, and it does not presume anything about its audience other than a capacity to delight in the incongruous and the absurd. [The movie] ... earns its status as a first-rate movie comedy on the basis of this dumb, cartoonish visual joke, something any child would understand, a silly idea executed with sufficient dexterity to make it funny beyond words.

Homer screaming "Doh!" shouldn't be funny once, but it's worked effectively hundreds of times. For all of The Simpsons' knowing, referential humor, it's often the big, physical gags that gets the loudest laughs. Thank goodness for dumb fun.