The series is based on a story about an ordinary family with three young children. Homer is a fattening, balding 40-year-old father of a family who, by an absurd accident, received the position of safety inspector at a nuclear power plant. Marge is a housewife who takes care of children: 10-year-old bully Bart, 8-year-old honors prodigy Lisa and one-year-old Maggie. Homer loves his children, he is sure that “Children are our future. Unless we stop them now ”(Children are our future. If we don’t stop them now).
All the inhabitants of the city of Springfield (the name was chosen from the most commonly used toponyms) are very caricatured and even grotesque, which is very convenient for us. Each character represents a stereotype accepted in American society. Some are very understandable and close to the bearer of the Russian mentality: for example, the mayor of the city of Quimby, although it is not clear how he got to this position, is actively engaged in bribery and builds an opera house that no one needs for his mistress, who considers herself a singer, and the city drunkard Barney unexpectedly discovers an artistic soul in himself and sings like Bocelli.
Slightly less clear to us are the characters and hindi to english translation whose images date back to purely American realities: the seller in the only convenience store at the gas station is the Indian Apu, who spends all his time at work and at the same time has a wife and eight children. And he speaks with an accent familiar to every American who has ever called tech support. Police Chief Wiggum is very fat and loves donuts – this stereotype became widespread when the FBI released a sensational study: it was found that US police officers die more often from heart problems than in shootings.
Since Americans were once a very religious nation, the tradition of going to church on weekends persists even among quite secular families and is an element of culture. An absolutely stereotypical, bored priest Lovejoy serves in the Springfield church, who has long been disillusioned with both the church and the flock, preferring toy railways to sermons.
In the elementary school, there are bullies who take pocket money from other kids, and a sinister foreign janitor, and asthmatic nerds. There are career women in the world of The Simpsons, and saints, and alcoholics, and a suicidal bartender, and a grandfather with endless stories about the war, and a news announcer with an on-duty smile, and a gloomy clown who is always smoking a gloomy children’s show host. All of them constitute a slightly exaggerated, but still not devoid of reality, outline of American everyday life.
