Alex Désert has just been announced as the new voice of Carl Carlson on The Simpsons, previously voiced by white actor Hank Azaria. This comes after the show announced in June that white actors would no longer voice non-white characters.
Désert has been a voice actor on a variety of different cartoons, you also might remember him from such TV shows as: Jake Malinak in the 90s sitcom Becker.
Following George Floyd‘s death and the Black Lives Matter movement, The Simpsons announced their new policy for voicing non-white actors. In January this year, Hank Azaria, who voices Moe and Chief Wiggum, said he would no longer be performing the voice of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Azaria also voices black police officer Lou and the Mexican-American Bumblebee Man.
The show has garnered criticism in recent years for using white actors to play POC characters, most notably called out in the documentary The Problem with Apu written by comedian Hari Kondabolu.
The film created a lot of controversy, by asking audiences to think critically about the negative affects of stereotyping a character like Apu. Even Simpsons creators Matt Groenig, Al Jean and Mike Reiss weighed in. Although, none of them had actually seen the documentary.
They even cared enough to address the controversy in a super cringe episode of The Simpsons. In the episode they used Lisa, who is meant to be the progressive voice of the family to be critical of the documentary. I mean, do you really think a vegetarian, anti-capitalist character like Lisa would really be against The Problem with Apu?
“My first thought was, how fragile are these guys? How fragile are these older rich white dudes that make this show, that they would actually bother responding?” Hari Kondabolu told Triple J.
Last month, Harry Shearer, who plays Mr Burns and black character Dr Hibbert seemed to disagree with the new voicing non-white actors policy.
“The job of the actor is to play someone who they’re not. That’s the gig. That’s the job description,” he told Times Radio.
“I’m not a rich nuclear plant owner. I’m not a Bible-believing Christian that lives next door to Homer. I’m not any of those people.”
To be honest if they just stopped The Simpsons after season eight when it was perfect, they would have never had this problem.
