About

Dark Simpsons (darksimpsons.com) is a website providing fan content for The Simpsons which is best known for its YouTube channel. The content consists of comics and videos that mix respectively shots and tiny clips from the TV series to tell unique stories with a strong emphasis on dark humor. As of May 2021, the main YouTube channel has garnered around 117,000 subscribers and more than 34 millions views.

Online history

The Dark Simpsons website ^[1] was created in early 2018. Initially, Dark Simpsons was a website sharing fan comics made from unedited shots from The Simpsons TV series, these comics often taking an absurd and/or dark turn. The Dark Simpsons YouTube channel ^[2] was created some time later, in late August 2018, to provide similar content in video format. A first video (shown below, right) was released on September 6 of the same year and was actually a video equivalent of the fan comic "Lisa the Delicious Vegetarian" ^[6] (shown below, left).

Unlike YouTube Poops, Dark Simpsons' videos are edited to look (almost) like genuine sequences from The Simpsons TV series. Therefore, they don't rely on the classical tricks of YTPs such as sentence mixing, as the voices come straight from the TV show. This doesn't prevent the videos from having some shock value: according to the Dark Simpsons website, "no storyline is off limits no matter how dark or offensive" ^[7], and both the comics and the videos regularly include – among others – murder and sexual abuse. Over time, the YouTube channel became the main source of Dark Simpsons' content. In a video published on June 1, 2019 which is only publicly available on the channel page, the author of the videos (whose name is unknown, but may be from Canada according to the YouTube channel) shortly explains how he creates them. As of 2021, the channel releases a new video every Friday, each video requiring between 8 and 10 hours of work according to their author.

Notable examples

Dark Simpsons' most watched video, titled "Marge rehearses with Ned" (shown below, left), garnered around 1.9 million views since its release in April 2019. A more recent video, "Lisa Likes Women" (shown below, right), has been watched more than 1.7 million times since its release in March 2021.

The channel occasionally releases longer videos, called minisodes, that develop more elaborate storylines. The first and most popular of them (1.6 million views), Bart Wets His Pants (shown below, left), narrates the consequences of the unfortunate event. Another popular minisode (1.2 million views) released in May 2020, "Marged Gets Her Sax Blown" (shown below, right), depicts the disintegration of the titular family after Homer avoided a date with Marge.

Darker Simpsons (B channel)

A second channel, Darker Simpsons ^[5], was created in February 2020 to gather Dark Simpsons' videos that could not be monetized because of their offensive content. The most watched clip, "Homer and Marge: Snuggle Monsters" (shown below, left), depict Homer and Marge as sex addicts. The second most watched clip (1.3 million views), "Return of the King" (shown below, right), is a 5-minutes-long minisode which starts with Homer molesting Bart. As of May 2021, Darker Simpsons garnered around 23,100 subscribers and more than 7.1 million views.

Fandom and study

Dark Simpsons' montages grew a cult of fans over time, to the point where they got their own page on TV Tropes ^[8]. Dark Simpsons also drew the attention of academics: a paper titled "Memes to A Darker Shade: Dark Simpsons, Un/Popular Culture and Summoning Theories of Darkness", written by Elisa Armstrong and Tara Brabazon, was published in December 2020 in the International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies (Volume 7, issue 4) ^[9]. The paper uses Dark Simpsons as a prime example of un/popular culture, a term coined to denote cultural phenomenons that are transgressive in nature and cannot be analyzed with the same tools and theories as popular culture.

Search Interest

External References