I've seen three posts here in the past two days claiming that Ralph Wiggum's only purpose is to "pander to the lowest common denominator." It can't be argued that he's a bastion of highbrow humor, but I think he's exemplary of the inspired wackiness that's at the heart of the humor of the series. Homer is dumb (as is the entire cast, at times), but only Ralph seems to be perpetually stuck in some other plane of reality.
This exchange...
Ralph: Um, Miss Hoover? There's a dog in the vent. Hoover: Ralph, remember the time you said Snagglepuss was outside? Ralph: He was going to the bathroom.
...is as clever and funny as this classic...
Homer's brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts! Homer: Explain how. Homer's brain: Money can be exchanged for good and services.
Ralph's non-sequiters aren't just cheap laughs, they're a part of his character, a character that is at least as legitimate as Homer's. There's nothing inherently wrong with having a character who's stupid or crazy; What's important is that the rest of the cast treats him like a person, not a mannerism. Of course, the supporting cast is mainly there to bounce jokes off of, but as far as Ralph's role in the show goes, this has been done pretty well. Who can forget Bart freeze-framing "the second when his heart rips in half?"
Ralph Wiggum is an important part of the colorful mosaic that we call Springfield. And I'll argue the same about darn near everyone else, too.
Thats never how I viewed it. I think Ralph is meant to be more exemplary of the stupid things kids say. Last night I heard about a kid praying thanks for sheep. Thats the kind of thing Ralph represents.
"Mrs Krabapple and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me." would have to be my personal favorite.
This is an excellent post, and I thank you for making me think--something that this newsgroup usually fails at. I will say right off the bat that I am probably the most anti-Ralph guy around. I personally am opposed to the ideology behind his existence. He appeals to the very worst in human nonsensicality and, were the world run by people with his outlook on life, civilization would collapse and we would all go back to living in the woods.
However, I do think Ralph has a place on the show. My problems are that he is overused and, moreover, that his inanity is egregiously exaggerated. Bear in mind that The Simpsons is already descending into wackiness these four seasons past, and characters like Ralph only heighten this imbalance. There are hardly any voices of reason left on the series, whereas there used to be many, capitally including Mr. Burns, Marge, and Lisa.
Humor is most effective in a serious universe. If you throw humorous elements upon a serious scene, they will contrast with the austerity that surrounds them and yield many great laughs. (Does anyone remember Jim Ignatowski from the show "Taxi"? Perfect example!) Most of the greatest comedy shows, The Simpsons included, began in a serious world and focused on wacky characters...like Lucy Ricardo of "I Love Lucy." However, as these shows go on and the seasons roll by, they almost all of them have tended to descend into the fatal error of making the entire surrounding backdrop just as wacky, like in the show "Happy Days." Wacky universe plus wacky main characters equals overkill, and a show will lose its appeal very quickly, relying only on the momentum of past seasons to carry it onward. This has happened with The Simpsons, and I assure you that if the show had begun with Season 10 it would have been cancelled by Season 11. Why? Because this fine program has lost its original purpose: make fun of the stuff that needs to be made fun of. Nowadays, The Simpsons only makes fun of itself, and that is blatantly not required.
And that brings us back to Ralph. He appeals to far more viewers than does boring old Marge, and yet he is the symbol of the fact that the show is rotting from the inside. American society will never grow stale; theoretically, a show like The Simpsons should be able to last as long as there is cultural silliness at work in need of a good kick in the butt. Of course, theoretically the card game of War can last forever, but it doesn't because eventually the balance is lost and someone wins. Well, the very same is at work on The Simpsons, with wackiness and nonsensicality overpowering reason and sense by a great margin--and believe me, folks, reason and sense have a role to play in any comedy show worth its salt.
Watching Ralph makes me feel like I am watching a little kid's cartoon. Everyone loves to be silly, and that's fine, but to focus one's personality around this silliness is disagreeable to my stomach, and that is why Ralph is my least favorite character. Regrettably, though, I am rapidly losing respect for many other characters. For example, Dr. Hibbert is today everything that Dr. Nick was six seasons ago. Julius Hibbert has become the butt of his own joke. Mr. Burns has decayed from a ridiculously immoral industrialist to a ridiculous industrialist--he is, like the doctor, now the butt of his own joke. Little Lisa, whom we should all remember is supposed to be eight years old, has decayed from a young girl with cares and genius to a radical liberal college student, and--in this thirteenth season--down further to a dry character without any of her former luster as a gifted kid or any of her sass as a whiny activist.
We all of us relate to someone or someones on The Simpsons; that's part of what made it a winning formula. But in these, the show's later days, folks like myself are left out in the cold while those who literally are the lowest common denominator--following only the fads of the week and taking interest only in that which can most emphatically shock their senses in the form of violence or zaniness--are ever more strongly drawn to the show. However, people like this tire quickly of the same schtick, and when something shinier than The Simpsons comes along, this fine show, once the greatest on television, will find itself without an audience. Ralph Wiggum becomes more popular all the time, and that saddens me...simply because it shouldn't be that humanity's worst vices win out over our best.
Lastly, I want to point out one last thing. All of the references you made to Ralph occured years ago, and not in the recent seasons. As I said, back then the show was great. Even I laughed (on occasion) at the non-sequiturs and sheer lunacy of this absolutely inane little boy. But those days have long since passed.
Anyhow, enough of me. Thank you again for such an excellent question.
You always write posts I�d like to write but can�t because of my somewhat limited vocabulary ;-).
I mostly agree with what you said (especially about the degradation and flatening of a once great and very outstanding character like Lisa) but personally, I wouldn�t call little Ralphie my least favorite character.
Ralph shares the same fate as so many (or all?) characters - he has become nothing but a flat tool of jokes, an empty caricature, that appears from time to time to blurt out a silly one-liner. Ralph never was a deep or somehow "real" character (he always was surreal) but in older episodes, he was at least a little bit of a personality and a kid that didn�t really fit into normal society, but nobody cared or noticed.
Take 9F13 "I Love Lisa" - Ralph has a lot of silly lines and his behaviour is as usual very strange, but he shows feelings and even a certain understanding of things around him. For one episode he�s Ralph but also a little bit more than Ralph, not only defined by usual stupidity and "out-of-this-world"-lines but by (his very own version of) emotions. He�s maybe not really able to express or even understand his feelings for Lisa, but at the end, Lisa is able to understand Ralph.
Well, the episode certainly is an exception but there are other episodes that use Ralph in a good way. Take 1F17 "Lisa�s Rival"- there�s a struggle between Lisa and Allison about who�s smarter and all the time you expect that at the end one will outsmart the other, but then little Ralphie wins Diorama-Rama (he�s so innocent, he doesn�t even know what a diorama is) and the others have to learn a lesson. And then the final scene - Lisa and Allison invite Ralph to play anagram with them and Ralph replies "My cat�s breath smells like catfood". This is IMO brilliant humor, Ralphs pure innocence (I�d call it pure innocence here, not weirdness) is an excellent contrast to the girls intelligence.
In later seasons, even Ralph was degraded. He wasn�t degraded to such a high degree as Lisa or Homer (he never was that much of a character) but he was degraded. He became more weird and even more out of this world, he started to see leprechauns, he started to appear for no apparent reason in episodes just to blurt out some weird line and he lost everything that made him so unique and special in his own way. The worst Ralph scene ever is maybe the one from "Money Caper" where he gets splattered with blood and says something about cable TV. Ralph used to be a likeable character (and I never had problems with him in old episodes) but as so many characters he has become annoying and thus more and more unfunny and unlikeable.
But why do we complain? Simpsons forever (<= bitter sarcasm).
Chris
P.S. Have you read my "Krusty Gets Busted" review? Any comments?
On Thu, 2 May 2002, Joshua P. Fredman, esquire wrote:
I agree with everything you've just said, but somehow I fail to become angry at Ralph, because he strikes me as the most innocent and naive person in the show. He's to me the Forrest Gump of "the Simpsons" (well, was, until at least I noticed a radical change in his character somewhere around season 9 or 10). Everything about his character and how it was built up the first seasons made me say: "Okay, so he's an idiot, but he means well. He's racing at a different pace than the other drivers.". The overuse of him these past years though, as you point out, and the hints at mental illness has made him very less likeable. Even so, I feel mostly sorry for a person like Ralph.
Definitely. But I feel that the amount of time spent on Ralph was more justified with the "old" Ralph. I'd rather see 10 minutes with the old Ralph than one with the new and improved" Ralph.
A very notable example is Monty Python.
This is so elegantly put, I can do nothing else than to salute you for putting words to my thoughts!
Let me second that, and thank YOU, Josh, for this insightful post!
Wow! I didn't expect to get an answer as well thought-out and eloquent as this...I'll do my best to reply in kind.
Josh writes:
Well, he *is* only eight...a very slow eight, but still just a kid. I imagine him turning out to be a Cliff Clavin-type idiot in the future, too inconsequential to do any harm.
But in any case, I still think that Ralph has potential, even if the writers aren't doing him justice. As far as satire goes, he could be a great commentary on small-town mentality (in reference to his father's connections) and social promotion.
[snip on balance]
I'll admit that I'm a lapsed fan, just now getting back into the show after five years of absence, so I don't really have the right perspective here. I have noticed, watching seasons 12 and 13 piecemeal, that the series is tending more towards glitter, slapstick, and (too) topical humor.
That said, I agree with you here. The one-off style of characterization is probably the most important aspect of the show's atmosphere, but it doesn't work unless Springfield itself is basically realistic. For instance, while I liked the episode "HOMR" overall, I hated the explanation for why Hibbert never noticed the crayon. Gah! That would have made an okay joke by itself, but hinging the plot on it was a bad idea.
However, I think Ralph has a place in a realistic Springfield (hey, there were kids like him in *my* school), and his recent misuse is the fault of the writing, not the character itself.
[snip]
Going back to the idea of balance between wacky and normal, which I carelessly snipped earlier, I agree that there needs to be some. (Monty Python notwithstanding :)) But, with regards to Ralph, it's not surprising that he's more of a favorite than Marge. Marge is the straight man. She's not supposed to be all that interesting, or even necessarily likeable. It's true that Laurel isn't funny without Hardy, but how many people will tell you they like Oliver more?
Now that you've pointed it out, I can see a tendency towards self-parody in the past few seasons; but I think I need to watch more before I can respond. I'm inclined to blame the writers, though. They seem to be ditching continuity and characterization for something...I dunno, weirder (e.g. Ned's wild mischaracterization in "I'm Goin' To Praiseland"). From what I've seen, though, this season has been better than last season, so maybe there's hope yet.
Some of the reasons Ralph is popular baffle me. One of his most well-known lines, "I bent my wookie." is popular mainly cause it's a Star Wars reference, and everyone eats up Star Wars references.
I would love to see what would happen if Ralph was reading Naked Lunch or any other book by that master of another plane of reality: William S. Burroughs
Erm, good question. As far as I've seen, Cletus doesn't live in Springfield proper, his kids don't go to school, and he's pretty much just there for random one-liners and to entertain the other characters.
However, as long as he stays in that role - or, God forbid, grows out of it - I don't have a problem with him. Like Captain McAllister and other background-type characters, he just adds to the atmosphere without getting in the way of it.
I suppose you're right. The most he's ever been given at once that I can remember was in the "22 short films" segment, which I didn't find funny (that part anyway). The only time I've ever laughed at him was his "lightswitch???" comment in another episode.