Fun But Not Hilarious

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2007)

This movie was fun, but not hilarious like I had hoped. I think it would have been much better had it contained more new jokes in the original humor style of the earlier seasons that made it famous. I realize this is a tough task for a show that's been on the air as long as the Simpsons has, but the movie had 11 writers who all had written episodes for the show at one point or another. You would think that this would really help out the originality, but it really didn't. In fact it seems like the opposite was true. There were a lot of jokes that had felt like they had already been done in the show disguised as new jokes by making slight alterations. For Example:
Spider-Pig/Harry Popper was almost the same idea as the Helper Monkey from the "Girly Edition" in season 9. The clapping joke in Alaska was like when the Murderhorn collapsed in "King of the Hill" in season 9 crossed with some Bart humor. The angry mob of people reminded me of the one in "Homer Badman" in season 6. The Flanders/Bart relationship was already explored in other episodes in the series like "Home Sweet Home-Dum-Diddly Doodly" in season 7. And there are many more...
I honestly appreciated the jokes more the first time I saw them in the show and did not feel that the ones in the movie were good tributes. They did not make me remember the good times as they were probably designed to.
In addition to the redone jokes, there were also plenty of gay, nude, and sexual humor that really felt cliché to me. I would have rather seen them done more originally or replaced with better jokes.
Now don't get me wrong though, the movie had some better new jokes too. I liked Ralph Wiggum's trumpeting in the 20TH Century Fox logo and Homer making a stop sign misspelled "SOP" followed up with the government agents saying they couldn't stop for every "SOP", "Yeld" etc. The Spider-Pig music was funny as was the "Paying to see something they could have seen on TV" joke. I liked most of the jokes involving Moe's Tavern and Moe himself, and the Bottox joke too. There were probably a few others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head right now.
I'll withhold giving it a star rating or anything like that for now, because I have only seen the movie once. Maybe after seeing it a few more times I will like it better.