Bart Simpson: America’s Bad Boy. From the moment The Simpsons debuted in 1989, Bart emerged as a powerful, even dangerous symbol of youthful rebellion. His attitude felt revolutionary, announcing a symbolic shift toward the outlook of the Gen X Slacker. Now, more than 30 years later, does his free-wheeling slacker spirit still resonate? Or does his community’s habit of laughing off his behavior with the mantra “Boys will be Boys” feel out of step with our times?
TRANSCRIPT
Bart Simpson: “I’m Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?” - The Simpsons, 2x4
Rebel, prankster, underachiever—and proud of it.
From the moment The Simpsons debuted in 1989, Bart Simpson emerged as a popular, powerful, even dangerous symbol of youthful rebellion. While the town of Springfield has given us dozens of memorable characters over the years, Bart was the show’s first and biggest phenomenon. His was the face that launched a thousand T-shirts—official and otherwise—and loomed over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Bart landed his own dance hit on the Billboard charts and starred in his own video games. His catchphrases quickly entered the cultural lexicon and Bartmania grew into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Murdoch: “You’ve saved my network!”
Bart: “Wouldn’t be the first time.” - 11x15
So how did a cartoon smart-aleck become this kind of sensation, seemingly overnight? Bart may have been just another in a long line of mischievous bad boys, but in the context of his time, his attitude felt revolutionary — it announced a symbolic shift toward a new generational outlook. Now, more than 30 years later, does his free-wheeling slacker spirit still resonate? Here’s our Take on pop culture’s favorite Proud Underachiever and how his gleefully bad behavior reads today.
Bart: “I am so great! I am so great! Everybody loves me!” - 4x10
America’s Bad Boy
Bart: “I’m America’s bad boy.” - 10x8
Every Simpsons episode begins the same way: Bart at the blackboard, being punished for yet another day of misbehaving. Bart is an incorrigible troublemaker.
Bart: “So it’s a prank you’re looking for is it? I’ll give you a prank.” - 5x3
But while his shenanigans have often led to property damage, injury, and emotional distress, they’re never exactly malevolent. Bart enjoys creating mischief—a playful form of misbehavior whose only end is his own amusement.
Bart: “Note for later: Put rubber spider down Lisa’s dress. Mwahaha.” - 6x2
Bart is loosely based on other lovable delinquents familiar to us from centuries of pop culture—like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Simpsons creator Matt Groening has also described Bart as “the son of Eddie Haskell,” the sneaky nogoodnik from Leave it to Beaver. And he was largely inspired by Groening’s disappointment with Dennis The Menace, the sitcom adaptation of Hank Ketcham’s long-running comic strip.
Matt Groening: “I was so thrilled by the idea of any kid who was actually bad and naughty, and then it turned out to be this namby-pamby thing. I think the kid had a slingshot, I don’t think he ever used it.” - My Wasted Life
As The Simpsons itself has often referenced, Bart is a Dennis who’s an actual menace.
Bart: “Dennis the Menace?”
Jay North: “Yes, I was America’s bad boy. I once hid my dad’s hat!” (Bart looks unimpressed) - 11x8
The cultural appeal of these mischief-makers is enduring: a study from the University of Barcelona in 2015 suggested that we tend to find impulsive, risk-taking people attractive, arguing: “they live frantic, galvanizing lives. This captivates many people.” There’s something liberating about them—as seen when a self-help guru encourages everyone to embrace Bart’s “do what you feel” ethos. Crucially, though, while Bart may be a bad boy, he’s never made out to be a bad person. He knows the difference between merely misbehaving and inflicting cruelty or committing a crime.
Bart: “You’re turning me into a criminal when all I want to be is a petty thug!” - 6x7
Bart can also be surprisingly sensitive and admit when he’s wrong. He also truly loves his family—even when he’s driving them crazy.
Bart: “I love you, dad!”
Homer: “D’oh! Dirty trick.” - 2x2
Bart was just menacing enough to stand out from the often-saccharine sitcoms of his time —particularly the biggest show of the ‘80s: The Cosby Show. When Fox put The Simpsons up against The Cosby Show, its then-CEO Barry Diller called it a “dragonslayer story”—and it wasn’t just about ratings. Pitting Bart vs. Bill—America’s TV dad vs. the spiky-haired hellraiser—was a challenge to the wholesome hegemony of family values sitcoms that had ruled the airwaves since Matt Groening was a kid. As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has noted, The Simpsons is set in Springfield, just like another classic American family values show, Father Knows Best. This, Rushkoff says, symbolizes how “The Simpson family is meant as a ’90s answer to the media reality presented to us in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”
Bart Simpson’s rebellion against that pervasive, Baby Boomer myth of the ideal nuclear family even made the President nervous.
George H. W. Bush: “We’re trying to strengthen the American family to make American families a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons.”
Bart: “We’re just like the Waltons. We’re praying for an end to the depression, too.” - 3x1 (1992)
In many ways, Bartmania signaled an end to the Boomers’ post-war American dream. He was speaking to a whole new generation.
George H.W. Bush: “Y’know in my day, little boys didn’t call their elders by their first names.”
Bart: “Yeah, well welcome to the 20th century, George.” - 7x13
Bart the Gen X Slacker
Homer: “See that boy? Why aren’t you making any business deals?”
Bart: “I’ll do it this afternoon.” - 8x21
Bart Simpson was born in 1985, which would technically make him a millennial—while, as a perpetual 10-year-old, Bart is forever young. Still, Bart’s debut coincided with—and fed off of—the rise of Generation X, and he embodied that generation’s central cultural archetype: the slacker. Lazy, directionless, and weaned on pop culture, the slacker’s rebellion wasn’t anger or even action, but rather a disaffected shrug.
Bart: “Nothing you say can upset us. We’re the MTV generation.”
Lisa: “We feel neither highs nor lows.” - 4x11
Like Bart, the slacker embraced goofing off as a natural, even noble state of being. The slacker was a reaction to a decade of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies that had privileged the wealthy while at the same time forcing Americans to work longer hours than ever. Advances in technology blurred the lines between home and office hours, and vacation was in short supply.
Bart: “I am through with working, working is for chumps!” - 2x21
The inequalities this had created—alongside the weakening of institutions like the nuclear family—spawned a generation of young people who felt prematurely jaded about their futures. They saw themselves reflected in movies and TV shows filled with characters who, like Bart, saw no real reason to try.
Bart’s slacker ethos was the driving force behind his popularity—and the source of one of the show’s earliest controversies. Critics, parents, and teachers fretted aloud about Bart’s influence as a role model. Nancy Overfield, then-head of marketing at JC Penney, told Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast that a grandmother accused Bart’s influence of “killing kids”:
Nancy Overfield: “She explained to me that kids are going to do what Bart Simpson says…They are not going to try in school, which means they won’t graduate, which means they’re gonna turn to drugs, and then they’ll overdose and die.” - Decoder Ring
In classic slacker fashion, The Simpsons just laughed off this moral panic:
Marge: “That back-talking boat sets a bad example.”
Bart: “Says you, woman.” - 6x13
In retrospect, the slacker rebellion was relatively short-lived, co-opted, and robbed of all meaning by commercialization. Fashions and sensibilities moved on, and the slacker spirit was killed off by the arrival of millennials, who embraced ambition and optimism. Meanwhile, like Dennis the Menace before him, Bart started to look positively quaint compared to what arrived in his wake—like the fire-obsessed miscreants of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head or the foul-mouthed kids of South Park.
In fact, if Bart’s influence left a lasting mark after this point, it was largely on Hollywood itself: The ’90s saw an explosion of troublemaking, smart-aleck-y kids in the Bart mold, on TV and in movies. Even the bad boys who had originally inspired Bart got their own revivals. And the rebellious counterculture he represented soon became the norm.
Bart: “Everyone in town is acting like me, so why does it suck?”
Lisa: “It’s simple Bart. You’ve defined yourself as a rebel. In the absence of a repressive milieu, your societal niche has been co-opted.” - 5x7
Bart to the Future
While Bart himself never ages, the times have changed around him. The Simpsons has now given us more than 30 seasons of Bart’s antics—and still no sign that he’ll ever change his ways.
Bart: “I’m in Television now. It’s my job to be repetitive. My job. My job. Repetitiveness is my job.” - 5x12
Meanwhile, he’s been supplanted by a new generation of cartoon kids that may share some of Bart’s wisecracking attitude and his distrust of authority figures, but also show more vulnerability, more anxiety, and self-awareness, or more optimism and ambition. Many have much bigger things to worry about than pranks or trips to the principal’s office. Bart is neither the revolutionary he once was nor the negative role model that parents worry most about.
Bart Simpson: “I stole the head off a statue once.”
Eric Cartman: “Wow, that’s pretty hardcore. Geez. That’s like this one time, when I didn’t like a kid, so I ground his parents up into chili and fed it to him.” - South Park, 10x4
At the same time, The Simpsons has been subject to contemporary criticism that judges the show through a more modern lens—whether it’s questioning why Marge would ever stay with someone like Homer or calling out some of the show’s more backward cultural depictions.
If we apply this more critical eye, the lax, tolerant attitude that Bart’s family and other characters take toward his misbehavior also seems increasingly outdated—particularly the way his community tends to excuse his wild antics with the logic: “boys will be boys.” The idea of “boys will be boys” actually dates back centuries to a Latin proverb declaring, “Children are children and do childish things.” But over time it became gendered, and it’s now widely regarded as both sexist and harmful.
Bart: “Hey, boys will be boys.”
Marge: “I am so tired of that tautology.” - 14x21
As Dr. Elizabeth J Meyer notes in Psychology Today, phrases like “boys will be boys” create internalized gender stereotypes that can shape children’s development and limit their opportunities. The expression also offers, quote, “an easy excuse to fall back on… and causes many adults to accept negative behaviors as ‘natural.’” While The Simpsons itself makes self-aware jokes drawing attention to this societal problem,
Lisa: “Judge Synder, motion to grant a writ of boys will be boys?”
Judge: “Motion granted. Case dismissed!” - 13x2
the very archetype of the lovably “mischievous bad boy” can start to feel out of step with our age in which more and more men are being held accountable for very serious bad behavior that’s long been written off as “boys being boys.”
To Bart’s credit, though, he’s never bought into gender stereotypes. And The Simpsons has shown us that the permissive “boys will be boys” attitude actually lets this young man down. In most glimpses of his future, we see that Bart is still plagued by his aggressive behaviors. His slacking has left him lagging well behind his peers. Time and again, we see that, when shorn of the vibrant arrogance of youth, Bart’s rebellion just looks irresponsible—even a little pathetic.
Bart: “I wish I could talk to my fourth-grade self just once, I’d say ‘work hard, don’t be such a screw-up!’” - 16x15
Ultimately, Bartmania didn’t last very long. As Matt Groening later noted, “There’s only so far you can go with a juvenile delinquent,” and around The Simpsons’ fourth season, the show shifted its focus to Homer’s misbehavior. Slate’s Willa Paskin attributes this sea change to the show settling into its “establishment status,” while Vanity Fair’s John Ortved points out that, by 1993, the old-fashioned, family values conservatism Bart had defied had largely ebbed away. What had once seemed new or dangerous no longer had the same impact. And after more than 30 seasons, to today’s kids, Bart Simpson is the establishment. He exists largely as a nostalgic abstract—a kitsch icon to be repurposed for designer sweaters, or into the lo-fi “Sad Bart” edits that are popular on YouTube.
Still, the philosophy that Bart represents remains (like the character himself) reassuringly ageless. Some have even argued that “it’s time for the slacker to rise again,” as a natural response to the constantly hustling culture of social media influencers, or the workaholic attitudes propagated by a millennial generation prone to burnout. Meanwhile, mischief has become increasingly gender-neutral, as seen in the recent pop culture explosion of female slackers and troublemakers. So long as society prizes working too much for too little reward, there will be room for these proud underachievers. And while Bartmania might have passed, there’s a little bit of Bart that will always be with us.
Marge: “I saved these for you Bart. You’ll always have them to remind you of the time when you were the whole world’s special little guy.” - 5x12