Book Review: Singh Slips Simpsons Secrets Subjectively

 

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Bloomsbury USA, 235pp, ISBN 978-1-62040-277-1

If your sphere of experience overlaps at all with mine, then in 1990 you had run through the entirety of Monty Python's catalog and were in need of something freshly bizarre to aid in informing your young comedic sensibilities. The Simpsons filled that spot for me and the hooligans I ran with, all of us noticing as we got older that the episodes had line deliveries followed by a silent pause which our comedic timing told us shouldn't be there. If we weren't laughing, there couldn't have been a joke and therefore shouldn't be a moment for people to laugh at that joke.

The understanding of hidden humor, coupled with the information that visual jokes had been virtually hidden by nature of being onscreen for only a second, caused me to learn to pause the VCR with a proficiency I haven't been able to develop in anything else since and seek out the references I couldn't recognize. This resulted in uncounted jokes with varying degrees of required maturity on billboards and buses, signs posted inside the nuclear plant or Moe's Bar, shot-for-shot recreations of scenes from films I had never heard of, a deeper understanding of Buddhist philosophy as it relates to miniature golf tournaments, and why proper punctuation is vital in all activities.

While we're here, Phil Hartman was the greatest

 

To this day my favorite is still the sixth Treehouse of Horror episode story “Homer Cubed,” which contains both Professor Frink's go-anywhere blackboard explanation of Homer's “Frinkahedron” projection into the third dimension and a number of concise but fascinating mathematical ideas that peacefully floated (or, if you prefer, peacefully failed to fall) around the three-dimensional space Homer found himself in. One of these jewels of human achievement went on to become my favorite equation of all time for what it represented to me philosophically. Called Euler's Identity and written e^(i)(pi) + 1 = 0 or sometimes e^(i)(pi) = -1, this equation contains what my statistics professor called the only five numbers that matter: e (natural log base), i (the imaginary square root of -1), pi (circumference over diameter for a circle, the same for a dime or the earth), 1 (the loneliest number that you'll ever do), and 0 (concretely understood first in India, although “zero” comes from the Arabic word for something empty). I encourage you to seek out more information on this identity, as it really is quite remarkable, but if you aren't the kind of person who doggedly hangs on to new ideas until you at least feel you're no longer completely uneducated on the subject there is literally nothing I can write that will compel you to go learn about an equation you've already forgotten. This schism in interests brings me to Simon Singh's recent book, called The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.

Knowledge makes you strong, kids

 

Singh's work is meant to be an encompassing insight on the math tidbits that the writers of the show snuck into episodes of both The Simpsons and Futurama to entertain either themselves or the fraction of people who would both want to replay a recorded cartoon and be able to get the joke, and I certainly can't think of anything he's omitted. The book also seeks to provide as much background as possible for understanding the gags, being mindful of the dangers inherent in short-term math overdose, and in this I think it succeeds as well. The book fails, however, in two tangentially related ways that I shall explain.

I related my personal introduction to the freeze frame gags to highlight that only a certain slice of people have that kind of reaction to hidden humor, and I think it's safe to argue that, like I did, once the tap gets turned on you never think to turn it off. It's not just the gag you saw last night, it's the understanding that other jokes in other episodes that you didn't even realize you were missing are waiting to be discovered, and some kid down the block has those on tape and you can go find them yourself. It is a self-perpetuating hunger, and one which is easily fed once the internet connected all of us in our search, allowing for the compilation of a master list I still have in a drawer somewhere, long since outdated, weathered dot-matrix printer guide strips still tenuously connected by stubborn twentieth century willpower. We knew all the jokes, even the ones we didn't yet understand, because to begin the search meant taking it as far as we could. As a result, Singh's book has the initial appeal of being precisely focused at my sensibilities, but there came a remarkable letdown once I realized I was having a part of my youth recycled and retold to me with all the emphasis on math and none on the Starlight Vocal Band. It was meant to excite me and convince me to part with money, but each chapter was another step into remembering the first time I heard the story on the episode's commentary track. Further, if you're already a lover of higher level math presumably none of the principles Singh talks about will be anything new, but if you don't understand them his explanations will not easily educate you. This book isn't targeted at a nationwide audience, it's targeted at the Venn overlap of Simpsons devotees and lovers of mathematics, and in my case it failed on both fronts.

Never forget.

 

My second criticism is the author's personal voice. I am unfair in this regard perhaps, because this isn't a textbook, but Singh provided several examples of the high regard mathematicians in general hold themselves over other disciplines, which I find childish and distasteful from any professional. Also briefly included were some of the author's thoughts on homeopathy and alternative medicines, which were not only unwelcome but well outside the author's scope and the book's purpose. I say again that this second criticism may be discarded without a second thought, because Singh is well-educated and many people had very nice things to say about this book, but passing snide remarks on disciplines I hold quite dear and personal interjections of ill-founded ideas on medicine apropos of nothing were so disjointed and persistently distracting as to make this book interminable for me.