Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Quotes

"It's not who does it first, it's who does it second."

—David Bowie

"A joke is never as funny the second time you hear it."

—Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

"Thing is, though, that it was such a defining soundscape of its era that it sounds terribly dated these days, and the John Landis video for the title track is positively painful to watch at this point."

—J. Eric Smith on Thriller

"Flaubert established for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible."

—James Woods, How Fiction Works (on Madame Bovary)

"Some people look at the quality of these early episodes and complain that today's animated upstarts aren't being given enough time to get their groove going before they get the ax. The error in that logic is that it doesn't apply to The Simpsons. I was there, and I remember the show being a massive hit out of the gate. It was Fox's first show to break the Nielsen Top 30. These 13 eps were all there was for months and millions kept tuning into the repeats. People loved these badly-drawn, out-of-character, seldom-side-splitting adventures just as much as they loved later, better seasons."

—Peter Paltridge, "The Lost Art of TV Guide Advertising Vol 10: The Simpsons"

"Coming up next on E4: Friends -- The One Where You Realise That It's Not As Funny As It Used To Be."

—Things You Won't Hear When Flicking Through Satellite TV, Mock the Week's Funniest Book of All Time 2011

"Back when [The Simpsons] first started, parodying things as extensively as [the show does] was a relatively fresh concept. Of course, parody has existed before then, but The Simpsons was a key player in making parody be a common thing. Now, they have a lot of competition. They have Family Guy, South Park, BoJack Horseman, Archer. [Rick and Morty avatar shown] They have a lot of competitors that took influence from The Simpsons and are now doing things better than they did, which makes sense if you think about The Simpsons as a show from the nineties, but it's kind of weird to think about that The Simpsons is now competing with a ton of shows that it inspired.

And a big part of what made The Simpsons great in the first place was that it did what no other show did, by extensively parodying movies and pop culture in general. But now, it has competition with all those other shows and the Internet. It is no longer a novel or new concept, so you have to do it a lot better than you did it back then.

And unfortunately, the parodies on The Simpsons have only gotten worse."

—PIEGUYRULZ, The Simpsons Will Never Get Better