The Simpsons Trivia Quiz: Are You a True Fan?

Trivia Quizzes TV Shows

Springfield has a nuclear power plant, a tavern, a Kwik-E-Mart, an elementary school, a gorge, a monorail that lasted exactly one episode, and no state. The writers have spent more than three decades refusing to say which one it sits in, planting contradictory clues on purpose and burning any answer that gets close, because the joke only works while the town stays generic enough to be anywhere in America. That vagueness is the engine of the whole show. A family of five lives there, a safety inspector at the plant, his wife, a ten-year-old troublemaker, an eight-year-old prodigy nobody listens to, and a baby who has never spoken, and around them sits a supporting cast large enough that the series has never needed to leave home to find a new story.

“D’oh” was not written in the script. Early scripts marked the moment as “(annoyed grunt)” and left it to Dan Castellaneta, who reached for the drawn-out “dooooh” that Jimmy Finlayson used in Laurel and Hardy shorts, then cut it short because the animation timing gave him no room for the long version. The clipped version stuck, and in 2001 the Oxford English Dictionary added it as a word, defined roughly as an expression of frustration at the realisation that things have gone wrong through one’s own stupidity. It is not the only phrase the show has put into circulation. Ned Flanders greets people with “okily dokily” and speaks in diddlys because the writers needed a neighbour whose relentless good cheer would make Homer look worse by contrast, and the show has separately pushed “embiggen” and “cromulent” far enough into general usage that both now appear in dictionaries of their own.

Matt Groening drew the family in a lobby in 1987, minutes before pitching James L. Brooks, because adapting his comic strip Life in Hell would have meant signing away the rights to characters he had spent years building. He named them after his own relatives, his father Homer, his mother Margaret, his sisters Lisa and Maggie, and invented only Bart, an anagram of brat. They ran as crude shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show for two years before a Christmas special in December 1989 turned into a full series, and the dog in that first episode, a greyhound abandoned at the track after losing a race, is still in the house seven hundred and some episodes later.

The Simpsons passed Gunsmoke in 2018 to become the longest-running scripted primetime series in American television, and its parodies have outlived a good number of the things they were parodying. Itchy and Scratchy, the cat-and-mouse cartoon Bart and Lisa watch, has been mocking television violence for as long as The Simpsons itself has been accused of causing it. Charles Montgomery Burns has been written as old enough to remember the Coolidge administration and rich enough never to learn his own employee’s name. Chief Wiggum, Principal Skinner, Apu at the Kwik-E-Mart and Krusty the Clown all began as one-joke background figures and ended up with episodes of their own.

The questions run from the parts everyone knows, the town, Homer’s drink of choice, his one-syllable expression of regret, to the details that separate a viewer from someone who was paying attention: his exact job title rather than the vague idea of it, the instrument Lisa plays, the year the series proper premiered. Each question turns up again with its correct answer under the quiz, which makes it simple to see whether the gaps sit at the plant, the school or the tavern.