‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ is turning 20. Has it aged well?

Days after Philadelphia’s District Council 33 launched a citywide strike that halted Philadelphia’s trash collection, a meme made the rounds on social media.

It featured a clip from season eight of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with the show’s trio of sociopathic schemers — Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Mac (Rob Mac), and Charlie (Charlie Day) — dressed in tuxedos, canvassing door-to-door in Philadelphia’s tonier neighborhoods during a garbage strike, offering to remove citizens’ trash via a stretch limousine.

The caption read: “Sunny is turning into The Simpsons.”

The comparison between the two long-running sitcoms can be interpreted a few ways.

In this case, it referred to the show’s sagacious, Simpsons-like ability to predict the future. But it can also feel like a burn. After 20 years, and 17 seasons (the newest just began airing on FXX), it’s natural to worry that Sunny, like the hoary old Simpsons, has lost a step.

When it premiered in August 2005, the show was distinguished as much by its cheap production values as its button-pushing, downright tasteless humor. From drunken driving to incest, animal abuse to child molestation, the show found a cult following toying with the taboo. There’s not an N-word, R-word, C-word, or F-slur the show hasn’t milked for a laugh.

Given broader shifts in taste and basic standards of cultural propriety over the past two decades, one cannot help but wonder: does this sort of comedy hold up?

Good news: a thorough, if by no means exhaustive, review of Sunny’s extensive back catalog of episodes suggests that … yes, it does. For the most part, anyway.

When Inquirer critic Jonathan Storm described the show, way back in 2008, as “Seinfeld on crack,” he nailed Sunny’s appeal. Like Seinfeld, its characters grind through petty conflicts with their foils, and with one another. (“Who are we doing it versus?!” Mac barks in one episode, unable to comprehend any sort of activity that does not have a victim.)

Also like Seinfeld, Sunny’s “gang” doesn’t exactly set the standard for moral or civic decency. It’s normal for fictional characters to have flaws, of course. But the gang is all flawed. They are mean, selfish, conniving, vain, and very, very stupid.

In the 2005 pilot episode, the hapless Charlie seduces a Black Penn student, only to prove to his actual crush that he is not, in fact, racist. Another early episode sees the gang dressing up as “jihadist” terrorists in order to scare off an Israeli business owner attempting to annex Paddy’s Pub, their South Philly dive bar, following a property line dispute.

In a later episode, Kaitlin Olson’s Sweet Dee stages a baby funeral after claiming a nonexistent child as a dependent on her income taxes.

You know: funny stuff.

Sunny’s humor might not land if the gang weren’t almost always the butt of the joke — well, them and Rickety Cricket, of course. While they may be socially maladapted and completely unhinged, the gang — and its creators — have also proven themselves capable of self-criticism, and learning from the many, many errors of their ways.

The show’s approach to changing standards of good taste is best exhibited in “Risk E. Rat’s Pizza and Amusement Center,” from the show’s 16th season. The gang visit a Chuck E. Cheese-style family-fun arcade, only to find the offensive animatronic characters of their youth have been retired.

Galled by the politically correct turn, the gang resolves to stage a good old-fashioned racist spectacle for all the kids, only to burn the pizzeria down. The episode itself is a half-hour commentary on the deluded belief that all offensive, racist entertainment of the past was somehow preferable to the alternative.

Sunny’s approach to race has become a little more sophisticated over the years.

“The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6” is one of several episodes that has been yanked from streaming circulation, due to multiple scenes of Mac donning blackface, while playing Danny Glover’s character in a homemade Lethal Weapon sequel. By the time of 2021’s “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7,” art imitates life, and a local library pulls the gang’s earlier movie, citing matters of insensitivity.

“The Gang Turns Black,” from 2017, is a musical episode that sees Dennis, Mac, Charlie, and Dee magically transformed into Black characters — played by Black actors, no blackface here. As they try to make sense of their fate, they grapple with their own limited understanding of America.

The episode concludes with the young “Charlie” (played by a Black teenager) being brutally shot by Philly police, who mistake his toy train for a gun. It’s perhaps the most provocative scene in Sunny’s 20-year run. And that shock has nothing to do with comedy. It’s a genuinely disturbing scene.

Of course, any show that runs this long is going to amass its fair share of misses: jokes and whole episodes that suffer because they’re off-target, or just unfunny. The Sunny gang’s ability to keep up with the times, if only by mocking its pieties, means the show will likely always have a place among any fan of boundary-pushing, or just straight-up tasteless television.

It’s a tired cliché that comedians give expression to the culture’s forbidden thoughts — “saying what we’re thinking.” It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia offers a revision on that platitude: even after two decades, the gang still always says, and does, what nobody of sane mind, or sound moral conscience, would ever, in a million years, think, say, or do.

And that’s exactly why they’re still so funny.