“Outta my way, I got a date with an angel.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
“You don’t know how right you are, Abe.” – Jasper
“What?” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Bea passed away last night. It was her ticker. The doc said her left ventrical burst.” – Jasper
“Oh, no Jasper, they may say she died of a burst ventrical, but I know she died of a broken heart.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
Dead Homer Society 
15 responses to “Quote of the Day”
That’s not funny. :(
“That’s not funny.”
Sure it is, it’s just also achingly sad. There’s a reason I make no apology comparing the writing on this show to Shakespeare and Twain.
I wouldn’t call it funny either, but that quote clearly depicts one of the moments of the show when it could easily play on emotions and present something that can be lifelike tragic and inevitable, without the need of any tongue-in-cheek schtick, strapped-on dialogue or blatant in the face self-explanation.
I’d call it funny. Funny. Beautiful. True to life. Sad. It pulls in all directions at once, which is really the greatest thing a piece of writing/animation/performance/art can do. Plus, I don’t think these are called “Funny Quote of the Day”. Doesn’t have to be funny to be an amazing quote from an amazing show.
Well said RL.
On the fact that it doesn’t have to be funny, we’re on the same note here.
“Oh, no Jasper, they may say she died of a burst ventricle, but I know she died of a broken heart.”
Joke being, for the 2 people here that don’t get it, that Abe didn’t know that a “burst ventricle” meant her heart failed anyway. Pretty funny to me, and good writing.
Thanks for clearing that up.
No, he meant that the doctor thinks she died of natural causes while he thinks it’s his fault, and that doesn’t constitute a “joke.”
That’s how Zombie Simpsons would have played it, feeding off of every last drop of sappy teevee emotion. But The Simpsons, being a thousand times more clever, saw a chance to subvert the broken heart trope by having it go completely over Grampa’s head, hence both poking fun at his senility and the cliched nature of the tragedy. And through all this poking fun, it still manages more genuine emotion in one line than an entire season’s worth of explicative monologuing from Zombie Simpsons.
Well, you’re wrong, as the line does constitute a joke, and a good one at that. Padday summed it up well.
Is it sad that about 20 years later the jokes in early Simpsons need to be explained to people? Or is it a testament to the quality of the writing that it can be taken on more than one level? To be fair, I never chalked it up to Abe’s senility. More that he felt his actions had been severe enough to have led her to somehow “give up”, and any physical damage was based on her loss of her will to go on (obviously they weren’t HIS actions, but he felt guilty enough to think of them that way). People in hospitals can often “hold out” until some anniversary, christmas, or family gathering, and the chance to say goodbye that it gives them, before they pass away. So to me it was really Abe’s clarity, his knowledge of events surrounding her death, that led him to describe it as such, and the play on words was as much on HIS part as it was on the writers. If you get what I mean. If it was his senility that the writers were trying to convey, then sure, I’m probably just adding my own emotions and feelings into the show as I experience it. But I’d like to think Abe, in that scene, was as wise and as cogent as we’ll ever see him. The joke was there because sometimes the only way to deal with sadness is to joke, to laugh at it. I know that’s what I do.
Abe knows what a burst ventricle is. And Jasper says earlier that it was “her ticker”. So there isn’t really a joke as you understand it. Abe just says that he knows why she died, as a bigger cause to her burst ventricle.
It’s like that scene at the end of Mother Simpson when Homer sits on a car watching the sky. There is nothing funny in it, and I will be damned if someone points something funny in there to me. But it’s a very good conclusive scene.
A Simpsons QotD that makes me sad? Now that´s a new one.
Bart´s “I tried! I really tried this time!” speech gets me everytime.
The lesson is: never try.