Parenting & Family Quote by Matt Groening

Groening is describing a sly kind of generosity: comedy that refuses to condescend. The surface-level gag keeps the Saturday-night viewer moving, but the “jokes the kids don’t get” are an investment in a future audience - and in the audience’s future self. It’s a worldview where entertainment can be disposable and cumulative at the same time, a show you can outgrow and then circle back to, like a hand-me-down that suddenly fits.

The intent is craft-forward and slightly mischievous. He’s signaling a writers’ room ethos that treats jokes as layered architecture: slapstick on the ground floor, cultural references and literary riffs upstairs, and maybe a bit of social critique in the attic. That structure is why The Simpsons (and Groening’s broader comedic sensibility) became a kind of mass-medium education without acting like homework. The kid laughs at the pratfall; the adult catches the dig at politics, media, or the self-seriousness of academia itself.

The subtext is also defensive: yes, it’s a cartoon, but it’s not “just” a cartoon. By framing the delayed payoff as something you unlock “after…college,” Groening links taste to learning, but he does it with a wink. It flatters the viewer’s growth while quietly insisting the show was always ahead of you.

Context matters: late-20th-century television rarely assumed rewatching, yet Groening imagines it anyway. That’s prophetic. In the streaming era, his model is basically the gold standard: art that meets you where you are, then follows you as you change.