ur of all the is the freeze frame humour. Groening explains: "Jokes you can only get if you videotape the show and play it back in freeze frame. What we try to do is reward people for paying attention." There are a number of freeze frame jokes in the corrections in Rock Bottom (a parody of TV show Hard Copy. For example: "Cats do not eventually turn into dogs" "The Beatles haven't reunited to enter kickboxing competitions" "Bart is bad to the bone" "Everyone on TV is better than you" "If you're reading this you have no life" These were corrections to stories that the show must have previously run. In this context they are quite amusing, but most viewers will miss them. This gives the show greater appeal as people know they are there and will want to find them. They will watch the shows over and over and form a cult following. "If you're reading this you have no life" is a reference to this cult following, telling people that they are wasting their time (just as William Shatner told Star Trek fanatics in an edition of Saturday Night Live). However, in doing this, the writers are continuing to put in place the mechanisms that first created the cult following. There are of course many grey areas here. Many jokes fit into two or more categories, and many jokes will also fit into issues of satire, culture, intertextuality and self-reference, which will be dealt with later. As previously mentioned, what makes The Simpsons visually different from other animations is its televisual rather than cartoon style. While other animations tend to be direct descendants of the comic strip, as a full show The Simpsons's closest ancestor is The Simpsons shorts which appeared on the Tracy Ullman. "The basic signifying unit of film - the basic unit of cinematic meaning - was not the scene…and not the unedited film strip…but rather the shot, of which…there may be virtually limitless number within any given scene." The Simpsons's realisation ...
