Children and adults alike love the popular cartoon The Simpsons. Famed for its irreverent and sometimes surreal depiction of small-town American life and featuring a beer-chugging, over weight anti-hero, it has never been terribly concerned with promoting healthy living. But now Australian scientists have concluded that the cartoon may be promoting cigarettes simply by showing characters smoking in so many episodes.
Guy Eslick, a public health specialist from the University of Sydney, discovered that over 18 series of the program, smoking was shown 795 times. While it appeared negatively 35% of the time, it was shown positively in 2% of the episodes and neutrally 63% of the time. Of all the occasions, 63% of them related to adults, 8% to teenagers and children and the rest to nicotine-addicted animals.
While most people who watch the comedy would be dubious as to the persuasive glamour of some of the characters shown smoking – one might particularly point to Marge’s chain-smoking, husky-voiced spinster sisters Patty and Selma – Eslick says that cartoon characters have been shown to be effective in marketing tobacco to under-18s, pointing to the Joe Camel campaign in the U.S. He added that previous research had indicated that the more frequently a child was exposed to smoking when watching films or the television, the more likely it was they would themselves eventually take up the habit. He concluded in the Medical Journal of Australia that the high number of episodes showing smoking in the Simpsons make it very possible that younger viewers might be encouraged to take up the habit.