Ebury £12.99 pp352

Shortly before his premature death by overdose, the American rock critic Lester Bangs reflected in print on his growing desire to mature as a writer, and to address grander themes of dehumanisation and the atrophy of feeling under late capitalism. He wondered cod-ruefully whether a decade or so spent in rattling off quickie reviews of albums by Lou Reed and Blondie had really constituted the ideal intellectual training for a would-be latter-day Spengler. A good question, and one that Chris Turner might well have pinned up above his desk and pondered before he set to work on Planet Simpson, in which he attempts not only a detailed evaluation of that wonderful cartoon’s development and nigh-universal appeal, but also a thorough geopolitical, technological, economic and cultural history of our era as reflected or spoofed by the antics of Homer, Bart, Marge and co. So: does 14 years of watching The Simpsons help make you a rival for Noam Chomsky?

Kind words first. Most of the better commentators on popular culture, from Hazlitt to Orwell to Pauline Kael, have been driven by a passionate love for their subject, and, in this regard, Turner is abundantly well qualified. He adores The Simpsons, claims (plausibly) that he lives his life in accordance with Simpsonian wisdom, and knows the smallest, frame-frozen minutiae of its episodes with an exhaustiveness akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder. His condition is, to be sure, not such a rare one, and, although he takes pains to dissociate himself from the sort of geeks who fritter away their lives in Simpsons internet chat-groups, debating whether Marge’s pubic hair is blue, his dense endnotes give the lie to all such disclaimers.

Turner is, at the very least, a demi-geek, a half-anorak. The stock of information yielded by this harmless mania is what will make Planet Simpson essential reading for nerds and intermittently interesting to those of us who simply enjoy and admire the show. Many of the worthwhile parts of the book come near the beginning, where Turner goes into some of the less well-known aspects of Simpsonian pre-history, such as the crucial role played by an absurdist magazine, Army Man, which provided Matt Groening and James L Brooks (the creators most of us know something about) with their staff writers George Meyer, John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti (largely unsung save by the cognoscenti). It was this trio that hatched that heady blend of cruel goofiness and breathtakingly insolent intelligence that typifies The Simpsons at its unrivalled best.

Apart from that . . . well, it is notoriously hard to write about comedy without seeming either po-faced or laboured, and quite often Turner simply throws in the critical towel and just summarises or quotes. This is just as well, since his prose style is not much above the fanzine level — in quest of snappiness, he peppers his sentences with cutesy words such as “anyhoo” and “craptacular” — and his range of cultural reference is at best parochial: his principal asides are devoted to favourite rock bands or recent glum American independent films. The Simpsons itself, by contrast, has nonchalantly alluded to the likes of Pablo Neruda, Susan Sontag and just about every 20th-century American painter of note.

Now for some even more unkind words. The more avowedly ambitious part of the book is largely flimflam and filler. Not necessarily incorrect, not even objectionable on the whole, just prolix and superfluous. Like a bar-room pundit, Turner parrots familiar lines about the growth of the internet, the rise of globalism and the nature of American hegemony, and draws his authority on these topics largely from a handful of middlebrow bestsellers. Like a lumpen-sociologist, he lacks a due sense of when the obvious is bleeding. And he writes of the triumph of popular culture over elite culture with that glib insouciance possible only in someone who has never been seriously seduced or challenged by a significant work of art. The Simpsons has added immeasurably to the world’s stock of reliable joy, but there are times when you need Homer’s Iliad, not Homer Simpson.

The real problem with Planet Simpson, besides its gee-whiz prose and occasional lapses into plain old illiteracy, is that Turner is punching well above his weight. In the pre-Simpsonian era, the liveliest popular culture was created by men and women of great creativity, verve and humour, but comparatively scanty self-awareness: intelligent, absolutely, but not intellectual. Think of John Ford or Chaplin, Max Miller or Marie Lloyd, or Chuck Jones, the creator of the Warner Brothers cartoons. An element of naivety was part of their talent, and left a handy gap to be filled by the words of the hyper-articulate. But The Simpsons, notoriously, is created by teams of Ivy League graduates bristling with PhDs in particle physics and Assyriology: egg-heads who know perfectly well what Barthes would have made of Bart. It would take wit as keen and literary flair as supple as theirs to do justice to the show, and Turner is gifted with neither: he may think like Lisa, but he writes more like the Comic Book Guy. Or, in the immortal non-word of Homer Simpson: Doh!

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