You’re ‘Dumb’ if You Think ‘Simpsons’ Predicted the Coldplay Kiss Cam

Dustin is way better at breaking down what does and doesn’t get clicks versus revenue than I am (much to his chagrin, I’m sure). But even I know when a story is red hot. That was the case when some white CEO got busted having an affair with his head of HR at a Coldplay concert. There was a video! The secondhand embarrassment was insane and took the (internet) world by storm. It cannot be overstated how hard it is to have something resonate on a universal level in these days of niche audiences. Still, the Coldplay kiss incident made the rounds so thoroughly that two terrible things happened.

First and foremost, corporations attempted to recreate the video with various staged incidents. The Philly Phanatic recreated the incident during a baseball game. Numerous anchors held each other after commercial breaks, feigning embarrassment when caught. Even Stephen Colbert used the viral moment during his first show back after the announcement of his firing (though he gets a pass because he’s riding a wave of goodwill and included Weird Al). This is all cringey, yes, but not as bad as a bunch of rubes thinking that The Simpsons had predicted the incredibly specific incident.

Some idiot posted an AI-generated screen grab from an episode of The Simpsons that depicted the moment in question. The dweeb captioned it by claiming it was from a 2015 episode. It wasn’t. But, in an example of “who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him,” plenty of people with no critical thinking skills spread the image, assuming it was real. The Simpsons certainly has a history of randomly predicting future events, but they are often circumstantial. There have been specifics, but I won’t mention the biggest one as even talking about it may throttle our ads (I’m learning!).

With the Coldplay Cam, it should be an obvious bit of fakery, and yet, there have been articles debunking it. Why do that when you can just have one of the creative voices behind the show call you an idiot? “Who could be so dumb?” said Matt Sellman at San Diego Comic Con this weekend. “Of all our 800 episodes we did, that those two dumb white folks — I don’t know what to call, the takes are done — like, who could think, who has such little reactive intelligence that this is in The Simpsons? And of course, the answer is hundreds and hundreds of millions of people! But when you see something that claims to be a The Simpsons prediction, just think for one second. Could that have possibly been on the show? That’s all, just think one second and then comment on the thing, they are magic, they’re wizards, they did it again.”

To be fair, “A wizard did it” would be a cromulent explanation to The Simpsons fans. But this should require no explaining. Matt Groening decided to have fun with the whole thing, saying, “We are time travelers.” He then made some more… likely predictions. “The Simpsons predicts Elon Musk will be the first man to land on Mars. Amazingly, he will crash land on Mars,” he joked. “But he will radio back that he is marooned there forever. And most emotionally of all, he will be able to hear the cheering all the way.” I’ll leave off the rest of his prediction, because, again, he mentions someone who messes with our money, but he positively mentions them, I can tell ya that much!

The folks behind The Simpsons are neither wizards nor time travelers. They are cultural mainstays, even 37 seasons in, and that won’t change anytime soon. People will give them the benefit of the doubt because they’ve been in the zeitgeist for decades. That leads to some stupid stuff, but I’ll take it.