Reception
Filmcritic.com ranked Barney 18th on their 2008 list of "The 21 Best Movie Alcoholics of All Time". Recognizing the character for his appearance in The Simpsons Movie, Filmcritic called him "the most awesomely funny town drunk in pop culture". IGN ranked Barney fifth on their list of the "Top 25 Simpsons Peripheral Characters" in 2006, stating that, "he's been a dependable source of humor through his many drunken asides, burps included...Occasionally he's sobered up...But let's face it, for comedy's sake, The Simpsons is better off with a drunken Barney mouthing off at Moe's." Author Chris Turner (Planet Simpson) said, "Making sober falls into the trap of all the stuff The Simpsons satirizes, all those simple sitcom narratives where everything is wrapped up in half an hour and everyone learns a lesson in the end."
Britain's The Guardian said that Barney "should be hailed for making compulsive drinking a source of comedy on US TV, a hitherto impossible dream." Entertainment Weekly placed "Mr. Plow" sixth on their list of the best 25 Simpsons episodes in 2003. In 2004, Dan Castellaneta won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for voicing several characters, including Barney, in the episode "Today I Am a Clown". "Days of Wine and D'oh'ses" was nominated for a PRISM Award in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Barney Gumble
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)