Worker and Parasite was a "fictional" cartoon on the animated television show The Simpsons. In the episode Krusty Gets Kancelled, the popular cartoon Itchy and Scratchy, featuring a very violent cat and mouse, leaves the Krusty the Clown Show for Krusty's new competitor, Gabbo. "Eastern Europe's favorite cat and mouse team, Worker and Parasite" were a cheap replacement. According to the title screen, it was made in 1956 under the Khrushchev regime in the USSR. The writers of The Simpsons intended it as a satire of the Soviet socialist realism posters of the 1930s.

The cartoon itself was quite unintelligible, and featured a crudely drawn cat and mouse chattering incoherently and bouncing around in front of a breadline of peasants. Krusty's on-air response afterwards was shocked silence, a limp cigarette and then: "What the hell was that?!"

Coincidently, the idea bears some similarity to the rather unusual set of Tom and Jerry cartoons (of whom Itchy and Scratchy are based on) produced in Eastern Europe.

"Worker and Parasite" is also the name of a band based in Chicago, Illinois. [1]