‘Simpsons’ Fans Turn ‘Steamed Hams’ Into Arthouse Cinema in ‘My Dinner with Skinner’

What if someone was to write, cast and direct a 44-minute fan film that combines the iconic humor of The Simpsons with the dressed-down, quiet and contemplative style of the 1981 drama My Dinner with Andre? Would the result be… delightfully devilish?

That, presumably, is the question that Canadian YouTuber Tyrone Deise asked himself when he conceived of “My Dinner with Skinner,” his latest viral project based on the iconic and endlessly meme-able “Steamed Hams” scene from the Simpsons episode “22 Short Films About Springfield.” For the last several years, Deise has been reimagining “Steamed Hams” in various hilarious and usually esoteric styles — his biggest hit thus far has been the animated video “Steamed Hams But It Was Banned in the USSR” — and his latest arthouse reinterpretation is his longest yet.

“My Dinner with Skinner,” or, as it’s officially titled, “Steamed Hams But it’s A Critically Acclaimed Feature Film,” is an all live-action, no A.I. exploration of relationships, identity and past Simpsons plot lines that sound absolutely meditative when summarized by a sweaty, real-life Skinner on a camera using a faux-film filter.

Absolutely chock-full of Simpsons references and Easter eggs to fill out the nearly 45-minute runtime, “My Dinner with Skinner” may be Deise’s most ambitious “Steamed Hams” project yet, as well as his most intimate. “My Dinner with Skinner” is also the result of five years of experimentation with the meme, and the wealth of experience Deise has in the field of turning a 150-second scene from a 30-year-old sitcom episode into an endless international film festival is evident in the laboriousness of his latest entry.

“I threw a lot of things at (the channel), nothing was really working, and then it was Steamed Hams that actually gained traction,” Deise explained of his “Steamed Hams” fixation during a recent interview with CTV News. Deise made his first “Steamed Hams” video, “Steamed Hams But It's a German Expressionist Film,” in 2020, and it just recently eclipsed one million views. “I got my film scan back, put it on my YouTube channel, and it sat there for a year, and then out of nowhere, it kind of blew up.” 

“Most of them take me between one and three months to do, and that’s anywhere from 40 to 120 hours of work,” Deise said of his “Steamed Hams” series, though “My Dinner with Skinner” required far and above his usual workload. “It’s definitely the most ambitious and complicated one I’ve done.” 

Deise now has a healthy following of terminally online Simpsons fans, and that includes Simpsons legend and “Steamed Hams” writer Bill Oakley, who told CTV of Deise's work, “A lot of people have done incredibly great work remixing Steamed Hams, but the work of Tyrone has elevated this to an artform. It is the amount of care, and the amount of painstaking work that goes into them that is astonishing.”

And, thankfully for the meme-addled minds of Deise’s fans, that work is never finished. As the director explained of his favorite subject, “Steamed Hams” is “endlessly remixable,” and he may yet be gaining steam.