Simpsons jokes, where art thou?

I hate listening to my friend’s stories about putting a beloved dog down. I have three back in… I hate listening to my friend’s stories about putting a beloved dog down. I have three back in my hometown, and I can’t imagine putting any of them to sleep – they’re too damn sweet.

But in retrospect, maybe it’s for the best. Yes, I love my dogs, but I would hate having to watch them suffer. That would hurt me more than their actual deaths.

This takes me to my point: “The Simpsons” – a show that started as a sketch for “The Tracey Ullman Show” back in 1987 that exploded into a cultural phenomenon and some of the best televised memories many channel surfers have. I take the fact that it premiered two years after my birth date as proof that there is a God.

I remember my first episode, the one where Homer buys a crappy RV because his neighbor Flanders had a lavish one. He ends up wrecking it and is then misidentified as Bigfoot. That was when I was six years old and wasn’t yet aware that cartoons could also be adult-oriented.

But from then on, I was hooked. I grew up along with the family (in a paradoxical sense) through its fair share of hilarious misadventures, loving every “Aye Carumba!” and every “D’oh!” It got to the point that in the sixth grade, my trademark was yelling “D’oh!” when I failed a test. I think many “Simpsons” idioms became similarly ingrained within the ’90s English language. Back then, the show was frisky and more than willing to play with pop culture.

I thought it would last forever. But like many good friendships, it dissipated with age. “The Simpsons” somehow went from being the best show on TV to becoming slowly the worst show ever.

I know I’m going to get a lot of flack about this, but when was the last time you saw a “Simpsons” episode and laughed? Sure, there’s the occasional chuckle, but there aren’t the resounding belly laughs that gave me the rock-hard abs of my dreams.

What happened? I’d forsake playing with my childhood friends to catch the latest episode. The annual “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween special was an event I looked forward to like Christmas.

Simply put, these latest episodes have become stale. They start feeling like the same old story put in a different setting. “South Park” was right in its assessment: “A show should never go past 100 episodes or else it starts to get stale with ridiculously stupid plot lines and settings.”

Look at the evidence. The Simpsons Archive webmaster got to choose the top 10 episodes for a USA Today article to celebrate “The Simpsons” big 300th back in 2003. The most recent one on the fan’s list was a 1997 episode, “Homer’s Phobia.” On another USA Today list for the top 15 episodes as picked by the show’s writers, the 2000 episode “Behind the Laughter” made the list. That left the latest three seasons out.

Another point of order is that the very first season enjoyed an average of 13.4 million viewers, while season 17 boasts 9.2 million. This is 4.2 million viewers fewer – slightly more than half of New York City’s population.

One aspect I blame is that the writers have focused more on the characters’ antics rather than the plot-driven insanity of old. Yes, it was funny watching Homer do something stupid, but at least his stupidity wasn’t the focal point of every episode.

The movie really exacerbated the problem. Even watching the trailer, seeing Homer doing “Spider-Pig” and “Harry Plopper” was a little painful to watch. While the movie did offer some of the show’s best jokes, it also served up some of the worst in the show’s history.

So while the yellow-pigmented family managed to entertain me for roughly 14 years, it may be about time for “The Simpsons” to go the way of Old Yeller. Yes, it’ll hurt to see them go, but the way I see it, the show has had plenty of good years. Now it’s just suffering.