Belmont High School Library: Allusion or Illusion?: a pop-culture investigation

Most people have a go-to pop culture reference that they consider to be either universal or a litmus test to discover who else uses that media lens to see the world. Some people quote The Office, some people quote Family Guy, a few years ago I discovered that a glut of students who all had grown up overdosing on Spongebob and assumed everyone else knew all of that show's surreal iconography. (I probably quote or think of the world in relation to The West Wing or its sibling broadcast SportsNight — for which I can only apologize for living my cliché.) But I know many people slightly younger than myself (but still considerably older than most of my students) who were effectively raised on re-runs of The Simpsons during their formative years, and so Simpsons references are their chapter and verse. When my niece was born and named Mabel, someone made the following reference to me, thinking I'd get it.

Screencap from the Frinkiac meme-generator for The Simpsons showing Bart at the kitchen table saying to Lisa, 'So then I says to Mabel, I says...'

I recognized the cadence of the language from Vaudeville-era jokes, but didn't think it was a capital-T "Thing". I was subsequently told in no uncertain terms that this was an infamous moment in Simpsons history. The cryptic use of this phrase, and the way in which the story Bart was telling was never finished perhaps both contibruted to how it stuck in viewers' minds, and it gained notoriety as one of the show's "most random references" — which is quite the strong claim in a legendarily long-running comedy that has made innumerable allusions over its institutional reign.

So, if you, like me, were intrigued by this phrase's notoriety and wanted to find out what "So I says to Mabel, I says..." is actually a reference to, what would you do? Well, you'd Google it. The results would look pretty much like this: a few videos, some Reddit posts, the normal populist results of Google's secret algorithm.

A screenshot of a Google search from Sept. 2023 looking for links between The Simpsons and the phrase 'So I Says to Mabel I says'

But there was a moment back in February 2023 when a writer on the show posted on Twitter his "definitive" answer to the question.

A screenshot of Josh Weinstein's Twitter account where he explained the origins of 'So I Says to Mabel', saying 'We had no room for the kids' story, so it had to be one-hundred percent freestanding. Hence Mabel'

This series of about four Tweets (two of which are combined here for clarity) made the claim that the "most random Simpsons reference" wasn't a reference AT ALL. However, just because the author says that this was the answer doesn't necessarily mean that it is. The fallacy of authorial intention states that just because a creator claims that the meaning of art or the stated purpose of a creative endeavor is one thing doesn't mean that there weren't additional subconscious, equally valid meanings that the creator wasn't aware of at the time. Also, creative people lie, even on Twitter. Either the concept of authorial fallacy or simple media literacy dictates that just because a primary source has made a claim doesn't mean it's not important to verify said claim. This is, incidentally, part of why people are the subject of Wikipedia articles are limited in their ability to write and edit their own articles.

So, out of curiosity, what did the internet think was the answer to the question before this writer came out with his "definitive" take? The Simpsons Archive, a fan-run webpage with hyper-detailed deconstructions of the minutiae of each episode lists various users' beliefs as to previous instances of the phrase. So while the Simpsons writer may have said on Twitter that, "'I says to Mabel'... is [a] totally freestanding" phrase, others believed they had encountered it in other media created prior to the episode's 1997 airdate. But it is important to observe that The Simpsons Archive doesn't link out to any verification of any of the claims it has collected. It simply reports those claims and apparently has faith in the contributors.

Phrases.org.uk, a British website that traces the origins, meanings, and evolution of common phrases responds to a user-submitted question asking about the origin of "So I says to Mabel, I says". This website ultimately comes to the same conclusion as the Simpsons Archive, that the phrase is a direct reference to a scene in The Great Gatsby, where two partygoers use the phrase in the same way that Bart does in the episode: as a storytelling device that is interrupted by a third party. While The Simpsons Archive did no apparent fact-checking of this claim, Phrases Dot Org says that a user went to the text of The Great Gatsby and found the reference there. Case closed! The The Simpsons writer on Twitter is wrong and our lack of trust is validated!

The Great Gatsby in Google Books, showing no instances of 'Mabel' in the text.

HOWEVER, when I did a full-text search of two different editions of Gatsby in two different websites, neither of them has the word "Mabel" anywhere in the text. So the claim by the user on Phrases.org.uk that she searched Gatsby and found the referred instance is apparently false! Case NOT Closed after all! So we swing back to verifying the claim of the The Simpsons writer, and we have to reckon with the fact that he is not the credited writer on the episode. That may seem like confirmation that his claim is groundless, but he was the executive producer of that season and is listed as "showrunner", so it's unlikely he wasn't in the writers' room for that episode. But the claim still might warrant further corroboration.

This is either interesting or boring, but it's a pretty good example of how The Internet Can't Be Trusted. This webpage says one thing! This writer says something else! This website says he's not the writer! All of this is to show that there is a significant amount of very niche, very nerdy, very granular content that can be easily found on the internet that doesn't lead to a definitive answer. There remains ambiguity, but if one wasn't careful and just checked any one of these sources, it would be easy to miss the fact that things are more complicated than one might have suspected. Which is why journalists often require two independent sources confirming a story before they go to print. And why most school research assignments attempt to guide you in the same direction, requiring at least three sources in a Works Cited, so that you don't take the word of one source and assume it says, to Mabel or to anyone else, the whole story.

# posted by Mr. Russell @ 10:10 AM

Monday, October 02, 2023

Allusion or Illusion?: a pop-culture investigation