Moe Szyslak
Morris "Moe" Szyslak is a recurring character from the animated television series The Simpsons. He is voiced by Hank Azaria and first appeared in the series premiere episode "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire". Moe is the proprietor and bartender of Moe's Tavern, a Springfield bar frequented by Homer Simpson, Barney Gumble, Lenny Leonard, Carl Carlson, Sam, Larry, and others.
Grouchy, lonely, miserable and prone to violent outbursts, Moe is constantly down on his luck, and has attempted suicide numerous times. Other running jokes featuring him include being prank called by Bart Simpson, running illegal activities from his bar, and an ambiguous ethnic origin.
Role in ''The Simpsons''
Moe's Tavern
Moe is the owner and operator of Moe's Tavern, frequented by Homer Simpson and other characters including Lenny Leonard, Carl Carlson, Sam and Larry and his former most loyal customer, Barney Gumble. The bar is noted for its depressing atmosphere and uncleanliness. The regular patrons of the tavern have been abandoned by Moe in several episodes in which he changes its target audience. The first of these was "Flaming Moe's", in the third season. As a running joke, Moe is sometimes seen engaging in unlicensed or illegal activities at the tavern, such as smuggling pandas and an orca in "Cape Feare" and "The Springfield Files", respectively. Particularly in earlier episodes, the Tavern was frequently prank called by Bart Simpson, who would ask for a gag name which when said by Moe would involve innuendo or insults.Personality
Moe is portrayed with a generally disagreeable personality: he has a short, violent temper, a penurious nature, a crass and undiplomatic manner of speech, and a mood that rapidly vacillates between anger, indifference and suicidal despair. He has an annual Christmas tradition of attempted suicide, but his attempts are comically unsuccessful, and he has already called the suicide hotline so many times that they've blocked his number.He is easily irritated, frequently threatening the patrons at his bar with a shotgun he keeps behind the counter. He is also gullible, and Bart's unending chain of successful prank calls to his bar are particularly infuriating to him, inevitably prompting a torrent of Red Deutsch-style threats of gruesome bodily harm in return.
He also is, however, occasionally shown to have a sentimental and caring side to his personality, such as reading to sick children and the homeless, although he is secretive about such behavior. In his interactions with his various girlfriends, he has also shown genuine selflessness and kindness, although negative elements of his personality inevitably emerge and ruin things. In "Thank God It's Doomsday", he asks for salvation, because "I've done stuff I ain't proud of. And the stuff I am proud of is disgusting."
Relationships
Moe has an almost non-existent love life due to his vulgarity towards women and his ugly appearance. Despite this, he has had a number of romantic experiences, including sleeping with his waitress Collette, dating a woman named Renee, and briefly enjoying the company of many women after he had plastic surgery. He also has a relationship and proposed to a dwarf named Maya, but Moe could not adjust to the difference in height, to the point where his ultimate plan to have his own leg bones shortened led Maya to leave him. He has long been infatuated with Marge Simpson, whom he calls "Midge", and has on occasion tried to win her away from Homer, although later episodes have shown him actively working to keep the two together. He has been romantically involved with Edna Krabappel as well as Marge's sister Selma Bouvier. Moe's romantic attractions have resulted in run-ins with the law; he has stalked Maude Flanders and other townspeople, he must register as a sex offender, and he has a restraining order placed upon him. At one point he is seen on his way to a "V.D. clinic". Despite his disturbing approach, Moe has showed to be a caring and devoted lover. While dating Renee, he wholeheartedly spoiled them with whatever they wanted and vowed to give up his bar and take them away from Springfield forever, even if it means losing his own money and doing illegal acts to make more money. When he thought he finally won Marge's heart, he promised to be "the best man she'd ever had".In "Pygmoelian", Moe and his three closest friends assess him as a gargoyle with cauliflower ears, lizard lips, little rat eyes, a caveman brow and fish snout, who is not pleasant to look at, listen to or be with.
Family and biography
Moe Szyslak illegally immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands. As shown in "Bart's Inner Child", he also used to have an Italian accent, hinting at Italian heritage. The Season 29 episode King Leer, finally reveals Moe's backstory and shows his family. Revealing Moe's father, who is called Morty still lives, and that Moe has a brother and a sister. Moe's family works in the business of selling mattress and beds, having a franchise with multiple stores in Springfield, the key to the success was that Moe's father kept infesting all rival business with bed bugs, making his business the only reliable one. When Morty asks a young Moe to infest a rival business, Moe refuses, then the family of the business Moe refused to infest, infests one of the mattress stores of Moe's father, and as a consequence Moe's dad stops speaking to him. Decades later Moe and his father reconnect in the episode. Previous to that appearance of Moe's family, the show had given many wildly inconsistent backstories regarding Moe's past, in "Moe Goes from Rags to Riches", an infant Moe is even depicted living on Mount Everest as the son of a Yeti..
Prior to that revelation, numerous one-off jokes had been made regarding Moe's childhood and his earlier adult years. In "Radioactive Man", he is depicted as having been one of the original Little Rascals, but was fired after killing the "original Alfalfa". However, charges were not pressed against him as the "original Alfalfa" was in fact an orphan owned by the studio. As Homer's boxing coach in "The Homer They Fall", he shows photographs from throughout his own boxing career, stating that his ugly appearance was the result of competing in the sport. Moe's college years are also depicted, in "Homer the Moe", which shows Moe as having attended "bar-tending school" at Swigmore University before opening what became Moe's Tavern. In "Springfield Up", footage from a documentary called Growing Up Springfield shows an 8-year-old Moe claiming that his father was a circus freak. He was unsure which one, but liked to think it was a little of all of them. This is further reinforced in "Sleeping With The Enemy" when he briefly asserts himself as a member of the Muntz family. After Nelson's father returns, blaming his absence on having been stolen away by the circus due to a peanut allergy disfiguring his face. Teenage Moe is shown again in "She Used to Be My Girl", where he is depicted working in the school cafeteria, given as his first job "since prison"; Marge is responsible for having him sent back there. "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story" depicts scenes set years prior to the series' present in which Moe and schoolteacher Edna Krabappel are shown to have had a brief love affair. In "Them, Robot", a flashback scene depicts a young child being stomped on by an elephant, and his face then changing to Moe.
In "Flaming Moe's", he is called Morris by his lover, and while in "The Springfield Connection",, he suggests that he only changed his name to Moe when he purchased Moe's Tavern. The show's many conflicting stories as to Moe's heritage have been sent up in the tie-in book The Book of Moe'', where Moe is depicted in several different foreign national folk costumes commenting upon them. An early joke in the series was that Moe was a European immigrant to the United States. In "Much Apu About Nothing", Moe is depicted taking his United States citizenship test; previously, "Bart's Inner Child" had depicted Moe's own inner child chastising him for abandoning his native Italian accent. Later, in "Bart-Mangled Banner", he reveals himself to be Dutch, and in "Lisa Goes Gaga", Moe describes himself as "half monster, half Armenian." Moe is also hinted to be Armenian in "Judge Me Tender", claiming that Armenian Idol is his favorite show. As for indications he was born in America, in "Homer the Heretic", Moe's claims "I was born a snake handler and I'll die a snake handler" while in "Day of the Jackanapes" he claims to have been born in Indiana. Azaria has mentioned that Moe is from the Queens borough of New York City.