The first time I felt like a fraud
I was about 12 or 13. Our English teacher had set us a public speaking task. Everyone had to deliver a speech on a topic they considered themselves particularly knowledgeable on. We got to choose the topic and there were no restrictions on it. Most people chose a book we’d been studying recently because, y’know, 12 or 13 year olds don’t have much expertise in any topic because we didn’t have much life experience.
I asked my teacher if I could talk about the Simpsons because it was basically the only topic I knew much about. I watched reruns of it constantly after school and had recently discovered the internet which filled in the gaps for episodes that never got put on rotation (the one featuring the twin towers for example. 9/11 had just happened about 6 months prior).
I was surprised when the teacher said yes I could talk about the Simpsons, because TV was considered by every adult in my life to be a brain-rotting pastime with no academic value — and here I was being told I was allowed to talk about it in school! How cool was that?
I don’t remember anything I actually said when it came time to do the talk. I had some vague notes but mostly spoke on the fly, but I loosely structured it around interaction with classmates. I asked people to talk about episodes they’d seen, how they reacted to it, and what they thought about the characters. Most people really liked Ralph Wiggum.
I must underline, I was 13, so I didn’t offer much insight into what made this show so popular, but the teacher must have been impressed with whatever I said because they gave me an A+.
Thing is though: I didn’t really feel proud of myself at the end of it. I felt like I’d just used school time as an excuse to indulge in a hobby. It felt like what was called a ‘doss lesson’ where we learnt nothing, although looking back, we actually had learned something. We’d learned about how simple cartoon stories connect to people, how people react to them and how these experiences stay with you, and the fact people reflected each other’s opinions proved how the stories had worked to leave a positive impression. And that insight hadn’t come from me: I’d demonstrated how a popular TV show had given a random collection of preteens a shared experience of what is ultimately a potential vocation. It seems obvious to say, but when adults in my life would roll their eyes at just HOW MUCH TV kids watched, they forgot that it is a job that people do. There is actual theory to engage in regarding how to construct characters and stories that connect with people. I just felt like a fraud after I talked about the Simpsons in front of the class because of this societal lesson that had been reinforced that TV had no value. Which in itself is weird, because the school did wheel out the TV and show us relevant episodes of the Simpsons in History or Religious Studies from time to time. Its not like this idea that TV was less valuable and less academic than other topics was reinforced by the school environment. There was just something innate in me that made me feel like a fraud for picking the Simpsons as my specialist subject and talking about it when I could’ve chosen, I don’t know, Tolstoy or Shakespeare. Something weighty and respectable.
Cut to twenty years later, and I’ve just released a 100 minute video on my YouTube channel where I analyse the characters and story arcs on the Simpsons, going much more in depth than I did in that class presentation in 2003 (well, I hope so, as said, I don’t remember anything I said, but I hope 20 years worth of life experience has granted me some more insight). I keep getting comments from people either reflecting or adding to my analysis of the characters, one from a guy with ADHD who talked about why he identified with Bart which I found really interesting.
And yet something that hasn’t changed between that class presentation and this project is this deep-seated sense that what I’m doing is a “doss” and that its easy and anyone can do it. Maybe part of it is because I watch something like the episode where Marge gets seduced by her bowling instructor and it seems easy to me to break it apart and try and understand not just THAT I liked it but WHY I liked it, and so I devalue my own analytical skills because the subject matter I’ve chosen is something I love and not some topic I’ve got no interest but that has more academic value like quantum physics or something. And sometimes I get comments from people who prove that using analytical skills on a TV show is hard. I laugh quite hard sometimes when I get comments along the lines of this genuine comment I got on a similar video I did about Friends.
“It’s just a FICTIONAL show.”
Yes, because analysing fiction is a new thing that I’m doing. It is a concept I invented. Its not as if people have done this for books and plays for hundreds of years. So what if I’m deconstructing a cartoon and not Tolstoy? This stuff is popular and there is academic work to be done in understanding WHY and HOW it engages with people,
