He has survived everything from a botched Nasa space mission to the sale of his soul to Satan in exchange for a frosted doughnut.
But as Homer Simpson and his yellow-skinned offspring celebrate their 20th year on air this week the first full-length episode of The Simpsons was broadcast on December 17, 1989 fans and critics alike are beginning to wonder when, or if, the worlds most unlikely cartoon hero will ever utter his last Doh!.
Originally devised as nothing more than a short, animated sketch to fill a gap in The Tracy Ullman Show, The Simpsons has outlasted every other scripted series in US television history, recently beating the 20-season record set by Gunsmoke, the 1950s Western series.
Yet even the harshest critics of the franchise who contend that the show should have ended during its supposed creative and ratings peak in the early 1990s concede that the demise of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie might take a few more years, if not decades.
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Unlike in Gunsmoke or Law & Order, where the cast age on screen, everyone in The Simpsons stays the same, Jacob Burch, the co-founder of the Simpsons fansite NoHomers.net, said.
Personally, I think the only chance of The Simpsons being cancelled is if a fundamental creative resource like Matt Groening, the creator, bows out. That might have a domino effect with the other cast members.
Fortunately for the millions who still enjoy The Simpsons combination of childish graphics, slapstick humour and multilayered scriptwriting (one episode, Easy-Bake Coven, is a parody of Arthur Millers The Crucible), Mr Groening, now 55, has shown no willingness to kill the mega-franchise that he created.
In another positive sign for the cartoons long-term survival contract negotiations with the shows voice actors, including Nancy Cartwright, the 52-year-old Scientologist who plays Bart, appear to have become less contentious than they were in the late-1990s, when US network executives threatened to hold casting calls to find replacements.
Mr Groening, who named the characters after his own family and set the show in a fictionalised version of his hometown, Portland, Oregon, claims that he never anticipated such longevity.
You know, its weird, he said at a press event. I thought the show would be successful. But the fact that were still standing here some 20 years later and talking about it is very peculiar.
There is another reason why many believe that The Simpsons will last far beyond the 448 episodes that have been broadcast: the franchise is immensely lucrative.
The trade magazine Variety estimates that Simpsons-themed licensing and merchandising alone have generated $5 billion (£3 billion) in revenues. The airing of repeats via syndication is also thought to bring in billions, and Simpsons: The Movie in 2007 took $527 million at the box office.
On top of all that theres the Simpsons ride at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, the Simpsons stamps issued by the US Postal Service, and the inevitable new Simpsons game application for the iPhone.
The show also continues to break new cultural ground: Marge Simpson recently became the first non-human to pose for the cover of Playboy magazine.
Although this week is the official two-decade mark, the cartoon family actually made its first appearance on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987. It took another two years before it launched as a fully fledged series, with a 30-minute Christmas special on the Fox network, which is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times.
At the time, Fox had also just been launched and The Simpsons was the first of its shows to reach the top 30 in the best-of-season ratings. A year later the show had become such a phenomenon that Michael Jackson had helped to write a hit single for it: Do the Bartman.
Nevertheless, many Americans were initially horrified by a childrens format being used to make adult jokes about an obese fathers drunkenness and his sons anti-social behaviour especially given that children enjoyed watching it for the bright colours and Tom and Jerry-ish violence.
Conservatives, in particular, saw Bart Simpsons loser mentality (motto: Underachiever and proud of it) as a symptom of a terrifying modern malaise. Outspoken critics of the show included none other than President George Bush senior, who declared that America needs to be a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.
The shows makers who can work for six months on a single episode reacted by upping the ante. If you dont like your job, you dont strike, Homer told his daughter, Lisa. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. Thats the American way.
Todays critics are rather different. They operate Facebook pages with titles such as The Simpsons: A Once Great Empire, Now On the Decline and Cancel The Simpsons Please. They argue that the brilliance and originality of the early episodes can never be replicated. They also bemoan the exit of the veteran Simpsons writer George Meyer and note that the show has become more about Homer than Bart. They say that Homer gets fatter and stupider with every season, to the point where he is now unlikeable.
Still, many of these critics continue to tune in every week. As one message-board user put it this week: I agree with the folks who say that it isnt as good as it was in its heyday. But I also agree with those who say its a fair sight better than a lot of the crap on TV these days.
