Redeeming Homer

This article via Ryan at Brewing Culture (a blog you should read).

I wasn’t allowed to watch the Simpsons back in the day (around ’93/’94… which was back in the day for me). I gues my parents thought the show taught insolence instead of respect for parents? I suddenly realised one day (could have been an article I was reading) that in the whole of TV, here was the Simpson family who actually attend church together… and quite cheap plavix regularly! A vary rare Hollywood occurance.

So from the Times Online:
There’s nobody like him… except you, me, everyone

He has a distinguished ancestry. There was Shakespeare’s fat, lying but ultimately fabulous drunkard Sir John Falstaff. There was Sancho Panza, another fat, worldly character, the foil to Cervantes’s crazed Don Quixote. And there was Wilkins Micawber, the hopeless but hopeful spendthrift in Dickens’s David Copperfield. Every age needs its great, consoling failure, its lovable, pretension-free mediocrity. And we have ours in Homer Simpson, the greatest comic creation of our time.