Parody a Comedy at Your Peril

Riffs on Shakespeare: MacHomer
Rick Miller
The National Post

I would like to see The Simpsons spoof Macbeth. At least, I would have liked to see them do it up to two years ago, which is when the smartest and funniest show on television turned self-destructive and became one of the dumbest.

Seeing somebody else spoof The Simpsons spoofing Macbeth is quite another matter, and not, I think, a very good idea.

Rick Miller, who seems a gifted comic actor in his own right, stands at a mic dressed in a shiny red tunic and a mini-kilt, signifying Shakespeare and Scotland respectively. He embarks on a one-man miniaturized version of the tragedy, in which each character is given the voice and mannerisms of a figure from the TV series.

Behind him is a slide-show, a swiftly-changing series of projections (his own drawings), which between them depict just about every inhabitant of Springfield ever to attract the cartoonist's pencil. This is so that we will know which he is playing at a given moment.

Actually, he doesn't need the help. Most of his impersonations are fine. He is especially good at Mr. Burns (complete with fussy, masterful hand gestures), who plays Duncan and is allowed a very Burnsian posthumous triumph; at Burns' acolyte Smithers, now transformed into the heir-apparent Malcolm; and at Ned Flanders, Homer's pious and much-hated neighbour, who here becomes Banquo, Macbeth's virtuous and much-envied military colleague. His murder is a major act of Homeric wish-fulfilment.

Homer, you will have gathered, plays Macbeth. This is not happy casting, either way.

Miller is not that great at sounding like Homer, and Homer is terrible at speaking verse. He gabbles it. (There is precedent for this. The great Dan Castellaneta himself was unable to bring off an episode in which Homer recited “The Raven”.)

Quite often the Miller Homer slips out of character, wondering, for example, if that might not be a pizza rather than a dagger that he sees before him. And here beginneth, as Reverend Lovejoy might say, the first confusion: Are we watching the story of Macbeth, done in an assortment of familiar funny voices, or an actual production of Macbeth done by the citizens of Springfield? Miller calls his Macbeth, MacHomer but lets all the others keep their Shakespearean names. He keeps switching the conventions, grabbing indiscriminately at whichever might provide the easiest laugh. The law of diminishing returns kicks in early.

There is, as it happens, an actual, and classic, Simpsons episode that shows exactly where he has gone wrong. “Oh, Streetcar” was the Springfield community musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

The fun of this is that apart from adding songs ("You're a gal and I'm a fella/Stanley, stop, or I'll tell Stella"), the Springfield actors take both their own characters and Tennesse Williams' absolutely seriously. (I know that speaking of fictitious characters as if they were real people is critical heresy. When the fictitious characters are cartoons it's probably an excommunication matter. But the fact is, I find the Simpsons crowd more real than anyone else on television.) Miller, by contrast, is stretching a facile two-minute gag to last an hour.

The basic problem is this. You can parody a tragedy, and all credit and hilarity to you if you succeed. It is very hard to parody comedy, because your audience has no way of knowing where your subject leaves off and you begin. All you end up doing is taking somebody else's jokes and passing them off as your own, which is what happens here. It comes off as a curious blend of plagiarism and sycophancy. It might be fruitful to satirize the marriage of the Macbeths in terms of the marriage of Homer and Marge, or vice versa, but you'd have to work at it.

Miller doesn't seem inclined.

There are some nice things. One is the casting of Krusty the Klown as the drunken Porter, one hack comic desperately grappling with the 400-year-old routine of another. Another, though it's funniest in the program, is the casting of Groundskeeper Willie, Springfield's one resident Hibernian, as "Token Scot". As for the Witches, the show was pre-empted by a Hallowe'en special in which Marge and her dreadful sisters gathered round the cauldron. ("If it were left to you, the whole soup would be nothing but newt eye.") Miller's choice of Captain McCallister, surely the least inspired creation in the series, to play First Witch is no competition. It seems arbitrary, like much of the show.

Miller changes voices with the speed of a virtuoso ventriloquist, and with the same unnerving hectic rhythm. There is an entr'acte in which he does a lightning series of pop-singer parodies and this, being less spun out and fawningly affectionate, is more attractive than the main attraction.