The Bard and Bart Simpson: A Natural Pairing?

Lynch detects the same parallel. "Both Shakespeare and Matt Groening are storytellers of their time," he says. "Both of them looked at their societies with a bit of a wink and a nudge."

Mass appeal is another common denominator. Shakespeare "was pop culture back then," says Miller, adding that the dramatist's output "drew a kind of a cross section of society," just as non-kiddie-oriented animation does today. Miller's performing experience has reinforced his belief that, vaulting the high-culture/low-culture divide, "MacHomer" can shake off any scholarly dust gathering on the Shakespeare canon. "I've seen a lot of very dead Shakespeare," he says.

By contrast, "the energy in the room of people seeing 'MacHomer' is a lot more, to me, of what Shakespeare should be about," he says. "It's something very vibrant."

Popularity and topicality, though, don't entirely explain the show's resonance. Miller doesn't think he could have melded Shakespeare with, say, "Family Guy." That cartoon, he says, may be "funny and irreverent -- but people don't really care about the characters in the way they do about the Simpsons." That's because Groening's creations "are noble," he says. "Every single character in there has a kind of flawed nobility. And, you know, I may be pushing it, but I feel that that's why they're well-rounded enough to be cast in 'Macbeth.' People care whether or not they die."

If Miller has devoted a good deal of thought to the "MacHomer" dynamic, it's not because the affectionate sendup is the only arrow in his quiver. He has served as host of the ABC comedy series "Just for Laughs," and is the co-creator (with Dawson Nichols and Daniel Brooks, respectively) of "Into the Ring" and "Bigger Than Jesus," shows that explore, in the first instance, the "Lord of the Rings" phenomenon and, in the second, the gravitational pull of the Jesus figure on Western society. These last two projects have a meta-cultural slant akin to "MacHomer's."

"If things reach this mass audience, whether it's Homer [Simpson] or Jesus or Tolkien, what's the mechanism behind it?" Miller asks, framing the question that perennially fascinates him.

The actor also has frequently collaborated with celebrated avant-garde director Robert Lepage, most recently performing in a (gulp) nine-hour spectacle called "Lipsynch." Miller doesn't consider such highbrow fare to be of a radically different order from his "Simpsons" crowd-pleaser.

"I don't really see much distinction between all the different kinds of plays that I do," he says. "It just touches people in different ways."

Besides, he says, "I don't look down on 'MacHomer' the way I may have used to. I used to think it was just a silly joke -- but it really has made half a million people laugh."