Last year the Labour MP Chris Bryant accused Tom Usher a journalist whose main beat is eating excessive amounts of takeaway food for Vice magazine of threatening to have him repeatedly hit in the head with hammers.

Usher had responded to something Bryant had said by tweeting a screenshot from the 1993 Simpsons episode Cape Feare in which Sideshow Bob having pursued the Simpson family to Terror Lake crawls out from underneath their car only to be immediately smacked in the face by a rake. And then another rake.

And then the camera pans to reveal a vast semi-circle of rakes each one of which is now going to hit Sideshow Bob in the face. In the screenshot Usher had captioned Sideshow Bob Chris Bryant and the rakes Various academics repeatedly hammering his shit takes.

To some this exchange was yet more proof that most public figures should never have been allowed to go on social media. Really this sort of thing happens on Twitter every day. But what made the incident stick in my mind — the reason Im still thinking about it — is the particular sort of illiteracy it revealed.

Bryant is 60. Usher is in his early thirties as am I. To many people my age the image of Sideshow Bob and the rakes is instantly familiar alongside countless other images sequences and lines from classic Simpsons the shows great run generally held to have lasted from season two (1990-91) to season nine (1997-98). (Somehow the show is still running its producers are currently working on season 34.) A lot of millennials like me cannot help but communicate in the language of rakes in the face footballs in the groin Old Man Yells at Cloud and of Good Lord what is happening in there?

And so it was startling to me when Bryant — someone who after all has been elected to make the laws in this country — not only failed to grasp what Usher was communicating by posting this specific Simpsons image but appeared unable to understand what was even being depicted. Usher had posted the Sideshow Bob rakes image to make a jokey point. And Bryant interpreted it as a death threat. Which would involve him being killed with hammers.

You might think that The Simpsons is just a TV show — perhaps one of the greatest TV shows of all time a show you enjoyed as a child or one you still watch now. But really the point of all this is that The Simpsons is not just a TV show. The Simpsons is a language. And Bryants problem was that he does not speak it.

This is hardly Bryants failing. The Simpsons is a language that a man of his age would never really have had the opportunity to learn. Younger people dont speak it either. Ive taught in universities for the best part of a decade and when I was starting out I could share a Simpsons image with my students and theyd immediately grasp the point that I was making. Nowadays I have to spell it out to my students and anyway they think its weird that I like The Simpsons so much probably because its been bad the whole time theyve been alive.

If I want to explain something to someone roughly my own age someone say between 27 and 41 years old I can index it to some bit from The Simpsons and the comparison will almost always be helpful. This especially goes if they grew up in the English-speaking world although I believe that dubbed versions of the show were popular elsewhere as well.

If I want to critique Keir Starmers leadership of the Labour party I can share an image of Ned Flanders hippie parents complaining to his childhood therapist Weve tried nothing and were all out of ideas. If I want to tell someone theyre being gullible I can invoke the image of Homers college nerd friends handing over their wallets to the criminal Snake posing as the wallet inspector. And so forth.

Why have people in this age bracket ended up speaking The Simpsons as a language? The answer I think is that for many of us watching the show was a sort of ritual.

When I was young my family went to church every Sunday and that was the focus of our week. Around the time we stopped going BBC2 started showing The Simpsons at teatime every Friday. School would end and we would get tea from the local fish and chip shop. I would always order a cheeseburger and the burger bun would have this white dot at the bottom where something about how the batch process worked meant it wasnt so thoroughly baked. The bite with this dot in was I thought the best so I would save it for when The Simpsons started.

The entire week led up to this the whole point of enduring school was so that on Friday at 6pm I could eat a cheeseburger and watch The Simpsons. Some days The Simpsons was unexpectedly cancelled so that the BBC could show golf or snooker instead. I have never known anger like that since. I once punched a hole in my bedroom wall.

In his book The Disappearance of Rituals the South Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes rituals as symbolic acts that represent and pass on the values and orders on which a community is based. Rituals he writes bring forth a community without communication by allowing participants to recognise one another through certain symbols. This Han implies is required for real communication to take place without rituals our lives lack structure and we are unable to recognise one another as shared participants in life in the world.

Thus Han names manners as a form of ritual good manners make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful gentle treatment of things. But one might also think of going to church or participating in festivals at certain times of the year. Rituals are characterised by repetition in ritual behaviour we do the same thing whenever we are placed in a particular situation at a certain point in the week or year.

I never participated in my teatime Simpsons ritual with anyone other than my siblings. And yet just as one might not need to have attended the same church as a fellow believer to recognise another member of the faithful the experience remains one that other people of a similar age and background to me are likely to have shared. True I am more fanatic in my devotion than most but if I ever meet someone of my age who does not know The Simpsons I experience a strange sort of vertigo as if I am encountering someone who has grown up on a different planet.

After The Simpsons aired on BBC2 it was always followed either by Malcolm in the Middle or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And while these shows might evoke a feeling of nostalgia I cannot now really remember what happened in any of the episodes. The Simpsons ritual has been so well-preserved in my memory because technology has since allowed me to play it back whenever I want to over and over. Thats true for those other shows as well but I dont want to watch Malcolm in the Middle over and over. The Simpsons rewards repeated viewings in ways that almost every other TV show simply does not.

Classic Simpsons was defined by a small team of writers who worked together on every episode packing in as many jokes as they possibly could both around the plot and to advance it. The writing at this point was characterised by an obsessive attention to detail even incidental gags were brainstormed for hours as the writers competed to find the absolute funniest name for say the magazine Marge is reading (Sponge and Vacuum perfect).

And so one can rewatch a classic Simpsons episode indefinitely and it never gets boring like the miracle of the Eucharist for believers there will always be a point to it. One can always bring it into what is happening right now.

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For Han rituals allow us to be at home in the world. By stabilising the world by giving our week (for instance) its basic structure rituals anchor us in the life that exists around us and allow us to explore it for ourselves. Certainly The Simpsons has always done this for me the canon of my general knowledge is things that once got mentioned on The Simpsons. I have no interest in baseball for example but I know the names of the players who guest-starred in Homer at the Bat (Steve Sax Wade Boggs Roger Clemens . . .) better than I do those of my extended family (just what is my brothers wifes surname?).

But of course a big part of being at home in the world is being there with others as well. New languages can form when communities are brought together. Nicaraguan sign language was born when the countrys first school for the deaf was opened in 1977 and the children who attended it merged the respective signing vocabularies they had been using at home up to form an entirely new sign language.

The ritual aspects of The Simpsons have provided those who have engaged in it with a shared perspective a stable collective context the ground of which they are able to place their feet on as they talk. This is what it means to speak The Simpsons as a language one understands the deeper silent meaning communicated in words or phrases like Chanel suit Ogdenville or steamed ham. (The Simpsons has also contributed neologisms to the dictionary from doh to yoink to cromulent the latter invented as a pretend word for a throwaway gag.)

Of course on this view of language a lot of things might also be one any intense fan community might count as speaking a language together (some much more obviously and literally do see Klingon Elvish or Dothraki). By that same token various dialects have flourished among groups marginalised from the mainstream. Polari for instance was a mixture of Romance Romani and rhyming slang used in London criminal and theatrical circles in the 19th century which became popular as gay cant. When homosexuality was still criminalised gay men found it useful as a way of bamboozling undercover police. What is interesting to me about The Simpsons is how generationally specific it is.

As one might imagine from a man who called his book The Disappearance of Rituals Han is not optimistic about their future. For Han neoliberal capitalism and the rise of the internet have taken a world in which we were able to form communities without communication and given us communication without community.

We are all constantly compelled to post and text and email to get het up about the big issue of the day to raise awareness and to be made aware. Yet we dont seem to do much with the utterances we make beyond provoking an emotional reaction some people for whatever reason will like what we say other people will get upset. And still the world burns still the economy balances on the precipice of collapse. Nothing in particular seems to stitch us together no shared context exists any more. And so sometimes youll make a joke about The Simpsons and a politician will think youre threatening to have him beaten to death.

My son has just turned three. Like his father he gets obsessive about the media he consumes. Here is a boy who will sit and narrate his favourite shows at exhaustive lengths while they are on TV before getting off the sofa to make his toys act bits of them out. But the way TV works now he never has to wait for these shows to come on almost certainly my son will never know the sweet pain of anticipation for his equivalent of The Simpsons at teatime on a Friday.

He can watch whatever he wants whenever he wants limited only by the streaming services weve subscribed to and the screen time were willing to give him. The same goes for his peers. Time does not bind them in the same way freed from the shackles of its necessity no ritual can ever take place.

I wonder then how my son will communicate when hes older. What might he have to take the place that The Simpsons has come to occupy in my brain? If ritual behaviour were to become completely secular — become that is completely individual — would we even be able to talk to each other at all?