Best Simpsons Couch Gags

Thirty-odd years of a family trying to sit down, ranked.

Entries
10
Category
TV
Updated
  1. A jagged couch-shaped hole broken through living room floorboards, dust still settling.

    10. Bart Gets an "F"

    The Simpsons · 1990

    The family sits and the couch falls through the floor. D'oh. The simplest gag here, it opened the highest-rated Simpsons episode ever, about 33.6 million viewers, aired head to head with The Cosby Show. In 1990 nobody needed a guest animator.

  2. A brown recliner with chrome rims racing down a neon pastel boulevard at night, palm trees and VHS scan lines.

    09. Teenage Mutant Milk-Caused Hurdles

    Steve Cutts · 2016

    Steve Cutts turns the opening into LA-Z Rider, a Miami Vice spoof in which Homer's partner is the couch and Flanders is the villain. VHS tracking lines included at no charge. Cutts was known for bleak shorts and chose pastels instead, a rare act of mercy.

  3. A spiral galaxy that dissolves into a DNA helix, set against black space, with a tiny couch at its center.

    08. The Ziff Who Came to Dinner

    The Simpsons · 2004

    A Powers of Ten parody: the camera pulls out past the house, the planet and the galaxies, which turn into atoms, then DNA, then Homer's head, all to Also sprach Zarathustra. Homer says wow. The episode was co-written by Homer's own voice, Dan Castellaneta.

  4. A smoking flying saucer wedged into a suburban living room wall, green goo dripping onto a brown couch.

    07. Mathlete's Feat

    Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland · 2015

    Rick and Morty crash into the living room, kill the family, and try to clone them back with poor results. Harmon drafted it, Roiland rewrote and voiced it. The most violent opening on a show that does a Treehouse of Horror every year.

  5. An impossible room of interlocking staircases running sideways and upside down, with one brown couch bolted to a wall.

    06. Homer the Great

    The Simpsons · 1995

    The living room becomes M.C. Escher's Relativity, staircases running in every direction, and the family navigates it like a normal Sunday. It opens the Stonecutters episode, one of the best the show ever made. A lot of pressure on a staircase.

  6. A haunted living room crowded with jack-o-lanterns, ravens perched on a couch, a stone faun statue and a winding staircase into fog.

    05. Treehouse of Horror XXIV

    Guillermo del Toro · 2013

    Del Toro's three-minute opener crams in The Birds, Nosferatu, The Shining, Hellboy and his own monsters, ending in a Pan's Labyrinth parody. He said he was borrowing MAD magazine's habit of hiding jokes in every corner of the frame. Bring a pause button.

  7. A row of fossils on a museum shelf progressing from a single cell to a fish to a lizard to a small ape skull, ending at a bowling ball.

    04. Homerazzi

    The Simpsons · 2007

    Homer starts as a single cell, evolves through fish, lizard, ape and caveman, then trudges through world history to the front door, where Marge asks what took him so long. Moe devolves along the way. At over two minutes with the titles, it outlasts some ad breaks.

  8. A living room with its walls lifted away on cables, a stage of high-kick show feathers, a circus elephant on its front legs and a flaming hoop.

    03. Lisa's First Word

    The Simpsons · 1992

    The walls lift and the family kicks in a Vegas chorus line with showgirls, handstanding elephants, magicians and the dog leaping through fire. It became the most reused gag in first-run airings, wheeled out whenever an episode ran short. Padding with great legs.

  9. A melting, smeared television remote lying on a stark white void, tiny scribbled stars drifting around it.

    02. Clown in the Dumps

    Don Hertzfeldt · 2014

    Homer fiddles with a remote, slides back to his 1987 design, then overshoots into a far future of melted, catchphrase-spouting Sampsans. Al Jean called it the most insane one they had ever done. It is also somehow about mortality. Standard Hertzfeldt.

  10. A dim factory floor of conveyor belts carrying stuffed yellow dolls, a woodchipper in the corner and barbed wire coiled along the walls.

    01. MoneyBart

    Banksy · 2010

    Banksy's opening pulls back from the couch to a grim sweatshop where kittens stuff Bart dolls and a sick unicorn punches holes in DVDs, all inside a barbed-wire Fox logo. Al Jean said 95 percent aired as intended. Fox paid for it, which is the actual joke.

Honorable mentions

  • A living room packed with four rows of folding chairs facing a small television, a brown couch wedged behind them.

    Marge vs. the Monorail

    The Simpsons · 1993

    The family sits, then four rows of Springfield regulars file in and block the TV. Conan O'Brien wrote the episode and calls it his favorite of his own. A near miss only because everyone has already sat behind that crowd at the movies.

Dishonorable mentions

  • An open can of beer on a wobbly side table, drawn in stretchy rubbery shapes, the couch bending as if alive.

    Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts

    John Kricfalusi · 2011

    The Ren and Stimpy creator animated a 35-second, gloriously off-model opener, and critics called it liberating. In 2018 BuzzFeed News reported two women's accounts that he pursued them as teenagers, one as his girlfriend at 16. The drawing was never the problem.

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