The Godfather: A Semiotic Analysis

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It all began with an episode of the Simpsons. Which specific episode, and in what context the life-altering gag was made is not important. The important thing is that somewhere, in one of the show’s hundreds of episodes and doubtless thousands of witticisms was a movie reference. Realizing that the joke was over my head, I turned to my father. “What’s supposed to be so funny about someone waking up screaming next to a horse’s head?” “How haven’t you seen The Godfather yet?” was his mumbled reply. I was 13 years old. Not exactly prime age for 1970s gangster films, but I had seen the severed horse’s head enough times to get the feeling that sitcom writing was built on these allusions. For a young comedian such as myself, the implications of this realization were staggering. Imagine how many jokes I missed out on because I had not seen the referenced material! I was determined to correct this lack of cultural knowledge. That night, I set out to see every film that would merit a reference in any pop culture medium. I perused the IMDB top 250, AFI’s “100 years...100 movies”, Sight and Sound’s top 50, …show more content…

However, I can see how this breadth of interests might lend to the impression that I’m scatterbrained. You might be thinking, “He’s all over the place!” while I ramble on about old movies, sports cars, rock and roll, and wayward Okies. But within these various interests lies a single focus: connections. If something grabs my attention, I look for connections to things I might also like, and soon a web of related topics surrounds my knowledge of the initial focus. I want to explore every aspect of the things I enjoy, so even the smallest detail can pique my interests and lead to other adventures. And because there are infinitely many relationships between everything in the world, the lists go

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