Behind the Humor of The Simpson's

The main focus of the episode of The Simpson's we saw in English class this past Thursday was mimeicdesire, or the the desire for what someone else has/wants. In the episode, Bart got a girlfriend without knowing it, broke up with her so as they could just be friends, but when his best friend Milhouse became her new boyfriend, he wanted her back just because he no longer "had" her and Milhouse did. Another focus of this episode is masculinity. In several instances in the episode, scenes were shown depicting Milhouse doing feminine things, such as playing with a girl's toy doll, and the comment that he had a scrunchie in his hair. When Greta decided to break up with Milhouse, she basically commented that he wasn't masculine enough for her. Now, not to copy from Chris Causey's post about Reiner Wolfcastle, Wolfcastle is the biggest focus of ultimate masculinity in The Simpson's series, what with the Hummer and big bloody action movies he makes, and it may be that since Greta is his daughter, her want of a more masculine boyfriend is due to how she sees her father, what her view of what masculinity truly is and how important of a quality it is for a male to have.
Audience wise, preteens and children seem to watch this show the most, but many what once were children and re-teens have grown up making the audience very wide range in terms of age. While the show portrays a lot of child like humor with the occasional prank phone call to Moe's, there are a lot of hidden meanings to the episodes, much like the focus I listed earlier. Unfortunately, since a large portion of viewers for The Simpson's are preteens and/or children, many of these meanings go unnoticed, hidden by the other more simple cases of humor.