Early last year, when British college student Lucien Hughes came down with a month-long case of pneumonia, he did what anyone stuck in a state of medically mandated sloth might do: He gorged on The Simpsons, one of his favorite shows since childhood. "When I was younger, Simpsons reruns were on every day at 6 pm," says the 20-year-old Hughes, who studies physics at the University of Nottingham. "I think I learned to read clocks because of that show."
But don't get the wrong idea. Hughes didn't spend his sick leave rewatching old Simpsons episodes. Instead, he logged untold hours messing around on Simpsons Shitposting™, a public Facebook group. At the time, Simpsons Shitposting™ had only a few thousand members, but in the year or so since then it has grown into a crowded, nonstop cavalcade of whimsy, full of shitposts—a catchall term for aggressively sloppy, oft-brilliant inside jokes, visual gags, and trollish mashups. Like all good meme streams, the Simpsons Shitposting™ group evolves (or, ahem, devolves) on a near-daily basis, but the emphasis is always on The Simpsons, particularly the show's giddy, inventive early seasons.
Many of the shitposts are straightforwardly nonsensical, like Hans Moleman getting hit by Tommy Wiseau's football; others make sense in a rando, modern-internet kind of way, such as Homer playing his saxomophone over Drake's "Hotline Bling." And some entries require a far-reaching, Frink-deep knowledge of early-Simpsons ephemera—the kind of wonderfully useless literacy that can only be accrued after years, even decades, of late-night reruns and quote competitions. "Obviously, there are some pretty low-effort shitposts," says contributor Ashley Callihoo, a 25-year-old toy store employee in Edmonton, Alberta. "But once in a while, you get a pretty clever meme that utilizes people's understanding of the show and adds to it or distorts it."
Of course, without that kind of deep-cut awareness, non-Simpsons fans wandering into the group might occasionally feel like a bit of a ding-a-ling. But even if you've never been on the Simpsons Shitposting™ page, you've likely come across its offspring. Last year, two of the group's more accessible creations spilled onto the mainstream internet: "Krumping Marge," a mid-dance frame grab of the Simpsons matriarch that wound up all over Tumblr; and, uh, "Steamed Hams," an endearingly ridiculous, admirably convoluted meme based on a throwaway line from a 1996 episode.
If you've noticed a smidge more Simpsons in your feeds lately—a Marvin Monroe avatar here, a Sideshow Bob reaction GIF there—the Shitposting™ group might be to blame. "To some, shitposting is pure anarchistic mayhem," says Hughes, now one of the group's moderators. "But it's more than that: It's making new content out of 20-year-old content, and creating these ridiculous in-jokes that thousands of people are in on."
That number could conceivably go even higher, given the multi-generational reach of The Simpsons. Later this month, when the show airs its 28th season finale, it will inch even closer to breaking Gunsmoke's record for the most scripted-series episodes of all time. (Gunsmoke aired 635 installments; The Simpsons will likely pass that mark next year.) Yet The Simpsons' most impressive achievement may be that, for nearly 30 years, it has been the internet's Most Riffed-On TV Show. Along with Star Wars, Star Trek, and the Grateful Dead, The Simpsons is one of a handful of pop-culture leviathans to have thrived online since the early days of the web: The alt.tv.simpsons usenet group launched in 1990, shortly after the series' debut, and it was followed by an impossible-to-count number of Simpsons discussion threads, homages, and fan pages, many of which are still up and running today. If you were online in the '90s, you probably lost a few weekend nights trading Troy McClure quotes on AOL or trying to download a DUFF_LOGO.JPEG file to a campus-lab desktop.
The shitposts represent an evolution of that tradition. They're a more deconstructionist form of Simpsons super-fandom, one that's been growing around the series in the past few years. It has spawned not only memes like "Krumping Marge" but also the debut of the GIF-generating Frinkiac site, the abstract Scenic Simpsons Instagram account, and the mashup genre known as Simpsonwave, which pairs vintage Simpsons clips with the kind of hypnotic, narcotic Muzak you might find at a high-end hot stone massage spa (Lucien Hughes was a Simpsonwave trailblazer). They're each examples of progressive nostalgia—a way for viewers to re-engage with episodes they've already watched numerous times, without merely mouthing along to the same old jokes. If you miss the heyday of The Simpsons, you don't have to dig out your Season 5 DVD sets; you can just plunge into the web and stay up all night, Homer-style, reliving the show via these weirdo reconfigurations.
And no site revels in that sort of absurdist appreciation like Simpsons Shitposting™, which may be why the group has experienced such Wiggum-sized growth in the past year. It now has nearly 186,000 members, and according to founder Geddy Johnson—who launched Simpsons Shitposting™ in early 2015—the page grows by about 100 members a day. It even has its own publicist. "I hit it right at the right time," says the 30-year-old Johnson, who helps oversee more than a dozen shitposting collectives on Facebook, including Kanye Kanyeposting™ and Evangelion Shitposting™.
But none of these groups approaches the popularity of the Simpsons page—nor have they gone through the kind of drama it weathered last year. To wit: In August, just as it was experiencing Poochie-like levels of popularity, Simpsons Shitposting™ was nearly shut down after Johnson sold it to a bunch of eastern European scammers—the beginning of a chaotic time for the group, one that saw outages, blowups, and several angry Australians. It turned Johnson into a controversial figure, even among his own admins. Not that he would do anything differently if he had the chance. "I'm kind of a miscreant online," he says. "I don't want to ruin anybody's life, but I do like people getting a little bit mad at me." If that philosophy sounds familiar, it might be because it was first espoused years ago by one the shitpage's devilish patron saints, albeit in more succinctly colorful terms: Eat my shorts.
The Simpsons Shitposting™ site began two years ago, when Johnson, in the middle of a funk, started posting random Simpsons screenshots to cheer himself up. "I have a hard drive full of episodes. Whenever I get really depressed, I watch The Simpsons over and over again," says Johnson, who lives in Seattle, where he's studying to be a sous chef. It was in March of 2015 that he finally launched a dedicated Simpsons shitposting page and started inviting others. Initially, Johnson says, the jokes leaned on later-era Simpsons, but as the group grew the emphasis shifted to the show's early years, when the guest appearances were less showy, the pop parodies more idiosyncratic, and the cartoon characters slightly less ... cartoony. "Seasons 2 through 9 is usually where where the money is," Johnson says.
Those initial seasons, of course, include some of the best-loved Simpsons episodes of all time, from "Rosebud" to "A Fish Called Selma" to "Cape Feare," all of which are overloaded with (but not overwhelmed by) briefly glimpsed supporting characters and unapologetically absurd one-liners (if you can't remember any of them, then clearly your name is Homer Thompson). But they also lack the detached, anarchic whimsy that crept into the show's later years. "The early seasons depict a different type of humor than what you see now," says André Kirkman, 29, a Seattle-based filmmaker who works as one of the group's admins and also handles its press requests. "They weren't saying, 'Here are some contemporary popular culture lessons' or 'Hey, it's Lady Gaga!' And they dealt with serious issues like poverty and depression: Barney’s a terrible alcoholic, Homer’s a terrible alcoholic—it’s like the stark reality we all live with, but done in this way that’s very digestible, and very true." Adds Callihoo: "It's '80s and '90s nostalgia. People who know how to use Facebook, and understand how to make memes, are likely the people who watched the old Simpsons as kids. It's something we all grew up with."
And because those early years were among the first to be subjected to years of televised repeats and VHS/DVD re-viewings, many of the jokes are instantly recognizable—thus making them perfect fodder for Simpsons shitposts, which come in all different forms. There are shitposts that incorporate Simpsons characters into other ongoing memes, like this "Cash Me Outside" riff:
Other Simpsons shitposts combine multiple show in-jokes at once, such as this gag run, in which members merge a Season 6 "Treehouse of Horror" scene...
...with references from other early-years episodes:
And those are just the relatively straightforward examples. As with all meme streams, a lot of the entries on Simpsons Shitposting™ require a bit of patience and research to fully comprehend, because they're feeding on jokes that have been going on for weeks, if not months. The group's admins have even been known to steer the creative direction of the site from afar, using their powers to will a Willie meme into existence. "Sometimes, we’ll shut down member posting and just force a meme—anything, as weird and abstract as possible," Kirkman says.
And when a Simpsons Shitposting™ meme takes off, it can slip the bounds of Facebook and have very real, very stupid IRL consequences. Last summer, the group became fixated on "Steamed Hams," a joke taken from 1996's "22 Short Films About Springfield" episode, in which Principal Skinner refers to hamburgers as "steamed hams." It's a perfectly isolated bit of early-Simpsons smart stupidity—"What was going through their minds when they wrote a joke like that?" Hughes wonders. On the group, it mutated and proliferated so thoroughly that, last summer, an Australian grocery store was flooded with Facebook queries about whether it carried steamed hams on its shelves.
Thanks to viral hits like "Steamed Hams" and "Krumping Marge," membership in the Simpsons Shitposting™ group "began to snowball," says Johnson, who at one point launched a Change.org petition asking that series creator Matt Groening acknowledge the group's existence (as of this week, it has just over 700 signatures). The increased visibility had its downside—Johnson found himself spatting with other sites that he claims were stealing Shitposting™ images—but the numbers continued to climb, especially throughout the first half of last year. Johnson eventually added the trademark sign to the group's name—a semi-ironic way to make it clear that Simpsons Shitposting™, along with other Facebook groups under Johnson's control, were part of a collective. But it was also a way to acknowledge that the group, which had started as a late-night lark, had become formalized—even if it remained, in essence, a giant, decentralized meme machine. By last summer, it had more than 160,000 members. "We try to, like, fuck with our members by giving the impression we're way bigger than we are," Johnson says. "But we're just some dudes with computers."
And it was around this time, just as Simpsons Shitposting™ was achieving some respectability, that Johnson received a strange message—one that came from thousands of miles away, and which contained a once-unimaginable query: How much money would it take for him to walk away from Simpsons Shitposting™ for good?
In "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk," a seminal Season 3 Simpsons installment, Mr. Burns sells the Springfield power plant to a pair of Germans for $100 million; eventually, the duo realizes that the nuclear facility is a mess, and negotiate to return the plant to Burns for half of what they paid for it.
It's a situation to which Johnson and his shitposting peers can probably relate.
Last year, amid all his shitposting sprees, Johnson underwent a discreet surgical procedure—or, as he puts it, "I had dick surgery." A stricture in his urethra, he says, had caused him immense pain. "It was just rough," he says. "Then I got a medical bill, and I was like, 'I'm not going to be able to pay for this.' "
Which is why he didn't hesitate when, last summer, a pair of Macedonia-based web entrepreneurs pinged him, asking if he'd be interested in turning over the controls to Simpsons Shitposting™. "I said, 'Sure, give me $10,000,'" says Johnson, who eventually negotiated a sales price of $3,500. Last August, he removed all the administrators, including himself, and put the Macedonians in charge. "I just needed the money, and I did it," says Johnson, who has a wife and young daughter. "And people didn't like me for that. They still don't."
Almost as soon as the Macedonians took over, Simpsons Shitposting™ underwent a sudden, jarring change—one that baffled users, much in the way Itchy & Scratchy's Worker & Parasite spin-off baffled Krusty the Clown. Johnson says the new "owners" wanted to monetize the page's six-figure membership, and images published last year by the Daily Dot show that Shitposting™ soon began featuring spam-like ads for dubious-looking sites like Healthyadvices24.com.
But the scheme foundered almost immediately, and soon Johnson was beset by aggrieved parties on all sides. The Macedonians were frustrated by their inability to make money and begged him to buy back the group. The site's members, meanwhile, were irked that he'd sold them out, and several shitposters reported the spam to Facebook. Others left the group altogether, and some started their own offshoots.
The sale "was super annoying," says Callihoo, who launched her own Simpsons CRAPposting page. "I understand needing money, and Geddy had every right to sell the group. But it wasn't fair to the hundreds of people who posted to that page every day—not to mention that the ads that came from the sale were for kinda sketchy sites. I wanted some quality memes, but all I got was 'You won't believe how many cigarettes this 11-year-old just smoked!!!!'" Adds Kirkman: "The admins were kinda upset. But, on the other hand, this is the ultimate shitpost: This group is literally being sold to eastern European spammers, and they're shitposting in the biggest way possible, right into the group."
Throughout the ordeal, Johnson says, he was receiving death threats—which isn't entirely surprising, given that his own online persona was at times gleefully confrontational: He told irritated users to "fall in line or fuck off!" after some of them reported the spamming to Facebook. Others he simply banned outright. "One Australian wrote me and said, 'I'm going to cut my dick if you don't let me back in the group,'" Johnson says.
Within days, some of the group's members—including Kirkman—began negotiating with the Macedonians to buy back the group, with one member eventually raising $1,200 via GoFundMe to pay the spammers and restore control. But even that deal had a Barney-sized hiccup: According to Kirkman and Johnson, before Simpsons Shitposting™ could be returned to its former glory the fund-raising member was phished by a group of eastern European hackers, who took control of the group in September. The site would eventually go down for several months. It took until December for Johnson and the others to convince Facebook to restore their admin rights.
Since then the group has been relatively stable and growing at a steady clip (in part, Johnson says, because he pretty much adds anyone who sends him a request). By the end of the year, the membership of Simpsons Shitposting™ will almost certainly have surpassed 200,000. That's nowhere near the 66 million fans of the official Simpsons Facebook page, but a rather remarkable number for a site that on many days serves no greater purpose than to remind you—in the most wonderfully, elaborately stupid way—that Lenny = white, Carl = black. "It's still just shitposting, but we're trying to manage it a little better now, because it’s become a big thing," Kirkman says.
As for Johnson, Shitposting™'s mischievous founder? "Oh, I'd sell the group again in a heartbeat!" he says, laughing. "I could always make another group for free. I love the group so much, but I also love money." And who can blame him? After all, as a wise man once explained, money can be exchanged for goods and services.
