Vortrag: Der Simpsons-Couch Gag: Ein experimenteller Raum für Animationskultur

In the organizer's words:

Thursday, June 13, 2024, 7 p.m.
Studio B, City and State Library, Max-von-der-Grün-Platz 1-3
Free admission
No registration required

Lecture: The Simpsons couch gag: An experimental space for animation culture

In the US sitcom, the couch is the central symbol of an entertaining family life, the uniformity of which the audience is introduced to right at the beginning, usually during the title sequence. Since the 1960s, families such as the Bradys, the Bundys and the Cosbys have turned the family sofa into an iconic piece of furniture from which the audience learned how to live together in America. The couch in the American family home became a euphemism for Western societies that consumed the American way from the sofa in their living rooms.

The Simpsons also initially embraced this genre convention. From the school, the nuclear power plant and the supermarket, Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart and Maggie always end up on the brown couch in their home on Evergreen Terrace - but never in the same way as in the previous episode. It can therefore be seen that the couch gag developed into a genre in its own right early on in the series. Over the decades, the couch gag has grown into a resonance chamber for animation culture, in which famous artists inside and outside the genre still find a place today, as do the ideas of fans and freaks.

About the speaker:
Sandra Danneil completed her Master's degree in Film and Television Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum and later earned a Bachelor's degree in Vocational Education. She is currently working as a PostDoc in the American Studies Department at TU Dortmund University, where she teaches seminars and is working on her second thesis on dystopias. In her doctoral project, she researched the Halloween episodes of The Simpsons, which she analyzed from a cultural studies perspective as a pop culture archive of the digital age. Her work Trick, Treat, Transgress - THE SIMPSONS' TREEHOUSE OF HORROR as a Popular-Culture History of the Digital Age was published by Schüren Verlag in 2021. In 2022, she also received the dissertation prize of the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the TU.

Sandra Danneil is a volunteer journalist at the Dortmunder Nordstadtbloggern, where she regularly publishes articles on gender and cultural topics.

- The event will take place right next door in Studio B of the Dortmund City and State Library -