What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Did ‘The Simpsons’ Predict Coldplay’s Kissing Scandal?
The buzz surrounding Coldplay’s recent kiss with Astronomer CEO Andy Byron is still raging. The latest: According to viral posts on X , Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , and possibly Friendster, The Simpsons predicted it back in 2015.
According to Megan Strickland’s Instagram post , The Simpsons Season 26, Episode 10, “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” featured the following image:
Sorry, guys, but The Simpsons didn’t see the kissing video coming . Season 26, Episode 10 is called “The Man Who Became Dinner,” but it involves aliens Kang and Kodos abducting the Simpsons to eat them. There’s no kissing cam or anything, and the viral image was created by artificial intelligence.
It’s become a tradition on the Internet to claim that The Simpsons predicted something that didn’t actually happen, and such predictions could easily be ignored if not for the number of times the show actually predicted future events.
The Simpsons Predict the Future
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of examples of how The Simpsons actually predicted the future. Here are just a few:
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Trump Presidency : 16 years before Trump’s first presidential election, as it’s called on The Simpsons. Season 11, Episode 17, ” Bart in the Future ,” is a flashback episode in which Lisa becomes president. At one point, she remarks, “We inherited a budget crisis from President Trump.”
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Oceangate Submersible Disaster : While the Season 17 episode “Homer’s Paternity” didn’t exactly predict the 2006 Oceangate Titan submersible explosion , there’s no denying that the submersibles look eerily similar to the real thing:
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Siegfried and Roy Are Attacked by a Tiger: In the 1994 episode of The Simpsons, “$pringfield,” German tiger trainers Gunther and Ernst perform at Mr. Burns’ casino. The performance ends in tragedy when they are attacked by a white tiger. This happened 10 years before Roy from Siegfried and Roy was attacked by one of his tigers.
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USA Wins Gold Medal in Curling : In the 2010 episode “Boy Meets Curl”, the USA curling team wins gold at the Olympics, eight years before the real USA team won gold at the Pyeongchang Games .
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Higgs Boson Particle : In a Season 10 episode, there is a visual gimmick where Homer writes a complex equation on a chalkboard. Fourteen years later, the Higgs Boson particle was discovered, and Homer’s equation turned out to be remarkably close to the particle’s true mass.
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Cypress Hill Performs with the London Symphony Orchestra : In the 1996 episode where Homer goes on tour with Lollapalooza, a joke is made about the hip-hop group Cypress Hill performing their hit “Insane in the Membrane” with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2024, this actually happened .
Are The Simpsons Writers Psychics?
No. But the recurring illusion of The Simpsons as a prophetic text is a fascinating example of how and why predictions of the future can seem so real. It makes sense that people can’t predict the future because it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s no coincidence that belief in prophecy is nearly universal, and these fulfilled predictions from The Simpsons illustrate why people believe in all sorts of predictions and prophecies.
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A broken clock is right twice a day : There have been 790 episodes of The Simpsons. Each is 22 minutes long, with about 10 jokes per minute. That’s 173,800 jokes and counting. The law of averages is enough to suggest that some of these jokes will happen. Considering that The Simpsons is a parody of a society that comes up with ridiculous outcomes that are funny precisely because they’re so plausible, something like the show correctly predicting a Trump presidency, a U.S. curling gold medal, or a tiger attacking its coaches is inevitable.
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People Lie: People say that The Simpsons always predict things like Coldplay’s demise for fun or profit, just as people have always lied to suckers to cheat them out of money.
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We Want to Believe : In the 1555s, the French astrologer Nostradamus published The Prophecies, a book of poems that is said to have predicted World War II, the Great Fire of London, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, and just about every other historical event. Nostradamus’s poems are intentionally obtuse, but once word got out that he predicted things, people started applying his words to everything. Like in the Simpsons submarine episode: Homer’s submarine looks a little like the USS Oceangate, but if no one believed The Simpsons could predict the future, no one would have made the connection. Same with the Higgs boson prediction: I don’t know enough physics to check the math, so I’m just taking someone else’s word for it.
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Self-fulfilling prophecy : Cypress Hill played with the London Symphony Orchestra because it was a joke on The Simpsons . Life imitating art.
Bottom line: The Simpsons is the Nostradamus of animated sitcoms. They didn’t predict Coldplay’s on-camera kiss, nor did they predict every major event in world history. Still, they were pretty funny back in the day.