Difference between revisions of "Abraham Simpson"

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Abraham "Grampa" Jasper Simpson, who was once voted the most handsome boy in Albany, New York, is the father of Homer J. Simpson. Abe is a retired night watchman (he worked at a cranberry silo for forty years) and currently resides at the Springfield Retirement Castle. Abe was once married to Mona Simpson, but she left him after becoming involved with a group of warfare protestors and was forced to hide after being caught at Monty Burns' germ lab. Despite his failed marriage, Abe has had a few relationships including one with fellow resident, Bea Simmons. Abe and Bea were smitten with each other, but Bea passed away suddenly at the retirement home.

Conception and creation

Groening famously named the five main Simpson characters after members of his own family: his parents, Homer and Margaret (Marge or Majorie in full), and his younger sisters, Lisa and Margaret (Maggie). Claiming that it was a bit too obvious to name a character after himself, he chose the name "Bart," an anagram of brat.^[1][2] When it came time to give Grampa Simpson a first name, Groening says he refused to name him after his own grandfather, Abraham Groening, leaving it to other writers to choose a name. By coincidence, the writers chose the name Abraham, unaware that it was also the name of Groening's grandfather.^[3]

Biography

Almost all of Grampa's biographical information is supplied by himself. Many of his stories seem to be wildly inaccurate, often physically or historically impossible, and occasionally inconsistent even with each other, suggesting that Abe is senile. As such, all information provided is taken with a grain of salt. Additionally, he suffers from sporadic narcoleptic attacks.

Abraham J. Simpson, perennially known as "Grampa" Simpson, was born in the "Old Country"; he apparently does not remember which country exactly. In the episode "Million Dollar Abie", he claims to be 83 years old, although he is sometimes described as older. He boasts of having been a watchman at Pearl Harbor, and claims that President Grover Cleveland spanked him on two nonconsecutive occasions.

Abe's recollections of his World War II experiences are sometimes implausible. Abe was not initially keen to fight in Europe. After the United States declared war he supposedly tried to avoid service by dressing in drag and playing for a women's baseball team in 1942, which kept him from serving for a year before he was eventually discovered. After "liberating" a stash of priceless art from the Nazis, his unit formed a tontine, and buried the art in a trunk at sea. Decades later, Montgomery Burns tries to murder Abe in order to get the art, prompting Abe to violate the tontine. When Abe and Bart retrieve the art from Burns after a spectacular confrontation, the State Department arrives to give the art to their "rightful" owner, a snooty young German aristocrat.

Abe fathered an illegitimate daughter in the United Kingdom the day before he joined the D-Day operations in Normandy. This daughter is seen in the same episode lending further credence to the idea that he served in Europe. Moreover, he once showed Bart and Lisa an album with photos of Germans killed by his platoon.

Abe was not a particularly caring father to Homer, as evidenced at one point when he tells his son, "Homer, you're dumb as a mule and twice as ugly. If a strange man offers you a ride, I say take it!" Homer does not normally appear to resent these casual abuses, though in one episode in which Abe calls Homer an accident, years of pent up anger on Homer's part leads to a temporary estrangement. Homer also takes every opportunity to ignore or eject his father, whom he placed in a dilapidated retirement home. Abe held a variety of postwar jobs, including a farmer in Homer's early childhood until the bank foreclosed. Abe was also a watchman at a cranberry silo for forty years. He spent most of this time living in a house he won on a crooked 1950s game show until he sold it to help Homer buy a house for his family. Abe moved in with the family, but was sent to a retirement home some three weeks later.

Abraham Simpson is estranged husband to Mona Simpson, father to Homer Simpson, father-in-law to Marge Simpson and grandfather to siblings Bart, Lisa and Maggie. He also fathered two illegitimate children; a daughter named Abbie by a British lady named Edwina while in England during World War II and Herbert Powell with a carnival hooker. He was briefly married to Amber, the same woman Homer married on a Vegas binge. Also in The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album, the family tree shows his parents' names to be Orville Simpson and Yuma Hickman. Abe's brother Cyrus appeared in the Simpsons Christmas Stories" episode. Cyrus lives in Tahiti with multiple wives.

He was married for several years to Mona, who became entranced with the hippie lifestyle after watching Joe Namath on TV. She became a fugitive from justice after she abetted in the sabotage of a biological weapons research lab owned by Montgomery Burns. Abe tells a six-year-old Homer that Mona died while Homer was at the movies.

Personality

Grampa Simpson is an old, grizzled, periodically incontinent and quite senile man, who lives in the Springfield Retirement Castle; which is a sad, lonely place filled with demented, crippled and depressed old people (a sign near the entrance says "Thank you for not discussing the outside world"). Abe also informs Lisa that residents are not allowed to read newspapers because "they angry up the blood". His closest friend appears to be Jasper, a fellow Retirement Castle resident.

He spends a good deal of his time writing letters of complaint. He once wrote to the President, complaining that there were too many states, and requesting that they get rid of three of them (simultaneously insisting that he was "not a crackpot"). He also wrote to "the sickos at Modern Bride Magazine" about his disgust at not seeing "one wrinkled face" or "a single toothless grin" in the publication. He also owns a 49-star American flag, because of his undefined hatred of the state of Missouri: "I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missoura."

He also is soundly rooted in his antiquated ways: "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." Like many of his fellow Retirement Castle residents, Abe is a devoted follower of Matlock. He even supports tearing down the Simpsons' house in order to complete construction of the proposed "Matlock Expressway". He seems to believe Matlock is a real person, suggesting they call him in to solve real-life crimes: "I say we call Matlock. He'll find the culprit. It's probably that evil Gavin MacLeod or George 'Goober' Lindsey." During a Matlock public appearance, Abe and Jasper swipe Matlock's pills, which were needed to prevent him from having a spastic heart failure. Once, reflecting on his lifetime, he lamented it as terribly boring and full of unruly teenagers, but then decided it was alright because "we did have two shows with Andy Griffith".