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Why We Joke About 'The Simpsons' When We Hear the Word 'Monorail'

Shared cultural touchstones foster a sense of community, and for better or worse, this is what we've got.
Nothing on Earth like a bonafied, electrified, six-car monorail. Image: Wikimedia Commons

A more empathetic (read: better) person probably would've thought of how scary it must've been to be stuck on the stalled Disney World monorail during a lightning storm, and then have to climb down. While reading about how 120 people's vacations were ruined or made much more memorable by the crisis, I could only think, “monorail, monorail, monorail, monorail…”

Literally stuck on a monorail at disney, lighting struck and we immediately stopped. I'm convinced that I'm going to die

— natalie (@nnaaatttalliiie) July 13, 2014

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Either you're totally lost right now, or, like me, you're trying to remember all the words to the monorail song. Not only is it from one of the greatest episodes of The Simpsons golden era, but as the Australian linguist Lauren Gawne explained, Lyle Lanely's Music Man parodying, public transit pitch is also a cultural milestone and “social shibboleth.”

In an interview with ABC Radio National, Gawne explained that we're so drawn to quoting from TV shows and movies because they function as signifiers that both to share something about ourselves, and test whether the person we're talking to understands.

“We like to share what we like with people as a way of identifying whether they’re part of our group,” Gawne said.

At first blush, my vast mental library of quotes from The Simpsons might just look like evidence of spending far too many afternoons watching not one but two episodes back-to-back after school. While that's true, it also has been a touchstone in many of my friendships with my fellow “indoor kids.” For other, likely more successful people, your cultural signifier may have been discussing a Gore Vidal essay; for us it was noting that Gore Vidal has “kissed more boys than I ever will.”

It's easy to see why the comment section on a website like The AV Club would fill up with pop cultural references including (and perhaps most prevalently) quotes from The Simpsons. The comment section is a community that is brought together and defined only by an interest in pop culture.

The quotes aren't only funny (or, maybe they aren't funny, but we still laugh out of recognition), but it's a testament of a shared past amongst people who don't even share a physical space.

Given that my knowledge tapers off around season 12—when show's quality began dropping, but also I got a driver's license—it also sort of dates me. I can josh around with Generation Xers and my fellow early Millennials about Hullabalooza, and that makes us “with it.” But somewhere along the lines they changed what “it” was, and what we were with wasn't “it,” and what was “it” became weird and scary.

So it seems unlikely that, say, the brace-faced teenagers tweeting from the stalled Disney monorail would've seen the humor in asking whether Batman was coming to save them, even if sociologically speaking, that's a pretty sophisticated joke to make.

Homer on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins. Image: Walimal73/Flickr