Jeff Goldblum Reads "Steamed Hams"

Steamed Hams is the meme that curiously will not die. The meme-ready skit from The Simpsons in which Principal Skinner lies his way into serving Krusty Burgers to his boss and lighting his house on fire has proven a fruitful source for clever memers for months. Each viral iteration of the scene brings the meme to absurd and artful new heights, and it seems as though every week there's a new remix which makes us say "Now this is peak 'Steamed Hams.'" The last video to do this, called Steamed Hams Inc., remixed the dialogue of the scene to fit the tune of "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz. One month later, a new challenger has appeared.

While on the press tour for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Jeff Goldblum, the quirky hunk actor and social media darling who has earned his fair share of memes in his time, was approached by GameStop to perform a reading of Principal Skinner's dialogue from "Steamed Hams."

Goldblum, who after the reading revealed that he had no idea what he was reading and essentially gave the performance cold, reads Skinner like a sly conman rather than a bumbling oaf. It's great fun, and particularly charming when Goldblum says "Hey that was great! I like the writing too! That was from what? The Simpsons? Well, they're brilliant over there!" He sounds like your jolly uncle who's learning about Star Wars for the first time and absolutely loving it.

Goldblum and "Steamed Hams" is a guaranteed recipe for internet success, the kind of clickable content that anyone plugged in to internet culture can enjoy. Well, almost everyone.

While searching for the video online, one may notice that the only extant copy is on Daily Motion and that the GameStop article which first hosted the video now redirects to a 404 page. That's because Bill Oakley, a Simpsons writer from the "Steamed Hams" era, was none too pleased with GameStop for the stunt. In a series of tweets, Oakley expressed his troubles with having Goldblum, who already canonically plays Simpson character MacArthur Parker, read a different character's lines, as well as his frustrations with GameStop for not crediting the scene's actual writer, Joe Blevins, in the video.

After Oakley's tweets, the GameStop article was removed, and the YouTube link embedded into other articles about the video went dead. Oakley has been a vocal supporter of "Steamed Hams" shitposts in the past, and even shared the first draft on Twitter at the height of the meme-craze, but monetizing the scene for profit without crediting the writer seems to be where he draws the line. GameStop memed too close to the sun, and, like Icarus, fell to a copyright claim.