The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  For Stella, who let me watch TV

  And for my mother, who didn’t

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction: “Hi, Everybody!”

  ONE - The Matt Groening Show

  TWO - The King of Comedy

  THREE - When Bart Met Tracey

  FOUR - Sam “Sayonara” Simon

  FIVE - Welcome to Springfield

  SIX - The Room

  SEVEN - The First Episodes

  EIGHT - Bigger Than Jesus

  NINE - Fallout Boys

  TEN - Buddies, Sibs, Dweebs, and an Odd Man Out

  ELEVEN - Conan

  TWELVE - Institutionalized

  THIRTEEN - The Godfathers

  FOURTEEN - Who’s the Boss?

  FIFTEEN - Foxy Boxing

  SIXTEEN - The Guest Stars

  SEVENTEEN - On and On

  EIGHTEEN - Under the Influence of Duff

  JOHN ORTVED - THE SIMPSONS

  Notes

  Dramatis Personae

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND

  Here it is, two decades later. I never thought that as I aged I would develop Groundskeeper Willie Eyebrow Syndrome (GWES), and yet nature has cruelly slotted me with it. And here it is, two decades later, and I still can’t go near cafeteria food without thinking of Bart Simpson’s corrupt lunch lady and her massive cartons of beef hearts on the rear loading dock. And finally, here it is, two decades later, and despite my urbane demeanor and general support for worthy causes, I can’t help but wonder how cozy Mr. Burns’s pair of loafers made of former gophers would feel.

  I remember back at the start of the kraziness, back when Fox was a plucky young network with a gleam in its eye, with the amusing-but-doomed Tracey Ullman Show operating at the tent pole of its aspiring avant-garde sitcom regime. I remember in that show seeing an amusing animation clip in which a very badly drawn and animated Matt Groening character barfed into a dish of mints in a doctor’s waiting room. (I think that’s what it was; my brain cells may well now have the neuro equivalent of GWES.) I remember thinking to myself, Man, I can’t believe they showed barfing on TV—that was so transgressive. Thank you, Fox, for opening new doors through which satire may enter.

  And so the Simpsons have been barfing into dishes of mints for more than two decades. Actually, to be technically correct, it’s the Family Guy characters who do the avant-garde barfing these days. But the Simpsons did open that door, and in so doing have created a self-sustaining mythology of archetypes and stories that unite mankind far better than NATO, Esperanto, or metric. During book tours I used to hand out cards and ask people to write down the name of their favorite Simpsons character and then hand it in at the end of the reading. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Bart or Homer or the big kahunas that were the favorites—it was the peripheral characters that were beloved: Duff Man with his Ooh yeah! and his tendency to refer to himself in the third person; Selma, the beloved chain-smoking lesbian hag; or (possibly the most obscure character of all) alcoholic marketing cipher Lindsey Naegle.

  The larger goal of asking people to write down the names of their favorite character was simply to create a nice mood in the room, and it always worked. You can find people in just about any mood, and after a bit of Simpsons banter, a more cheerful psychic homeostasis emerges. I remember in a Quebec hardware store, a teenage girl at the end of an aisle holding up a blue feather duster and saying to her friend, “C’est Marge Simpson.” Now that’s world peace in action.

  I suppose having GWES is simply a subset of a larger condition called growing old. I look in the mirror and am daily insulted by myself, and yet the Simpsons remain as young and fresh as always—except for the earlier episodes, which aren’t as well drawn as in later episodes, the ones in which Homer sounds funny, and which are too weird to watch repeatedly. (Fans know what I mean.) I like the fact that we don’t know where Springfield is. I like the fact that you still never really know where an episode is going to take you—to Capitol City, to Epcot, to Winnipeg, or to a dash of mints filled with barf.

  You may be entering this book with ambivalence—maybe it’s not a good thing to see how the show comes into being; maybe it’s best not to see the beef hearts being turned into lunch. But maybe you’ll come away from the book fortified and more eager than ever to turn the TiVo to Fox on Sunday nights. Forget Disneyland. Sunday night at eight is the happiest place on earth. Ooh yeah!

  Preface

  If you bought this book to learn something about comedy or its workings, I suggest you return it and put the money toward a copy of Freaks and Geeks on DVD. Comedy can’t really be explained with words, and Judd Apatow’s brilliant and short-lived series sheds more light on the subject than I could ever hope to.

  In a remarkable scene from the episode “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” Bill Haverchuk, a young teenager and perhaps the geekiest of geeks, comes home to an empty house after another humiliating day at school (he is fatherless; his mother, who works as a waitress, is dating the gym coach he loathes). Making himself a cheese sandwich, he sits down in front of the television. Immersed in Garry Shandling and the loneliness that will define his adolescent life, Bill begins to laugh. He laughs so hard the food falls from his mouth, as The Who’s “I’m One” plays over the action. His face scrunches into apoplectic expressions of joy. It’s a deeply poignant moment, representing not only the alienation and indignities many of us suffered as high school losers, but our search for solace, and comedy’s ability to save us.

  The series is Apatow’s finest work, and the touchstone in his path to becoming the James L. Brooks for my generation—developing thoughtful comedy blockbusters with fully realized and deeply flawed characters. Brent Forrester, who has worked with Apatow, told me that the scene was based on Judd’s personal experience, which I can believe. But really, it could be any of us.

  I’m stealing from George Meyer here, but I like to laugh more than the average person. I’m not sure where it fits on my list, but it’s up there. I and those of us who love comedy feel as though it is essential because, as one of James L. Brooks’s associates put it, “Funny helps you live through the pain.” I can remember countless weekend evenings, long past the time I should have been going to parties or on dates, spent alone or with a single friend, eating pizza and watching The Simpsons, Spaceballs, Saturday Night Live, or Waiting for Guffman. And I loved it, not because I didn’t know there was another world that I was missing but because this really was the next best thing; if I couldn’t laugh with others, I would laugh by myself.

  Humor’s import has been debated for centuries. Countless critics, from Aristotelean to George Saunders, have qualified, augmented, and tried to define its role: humor challenges society’s conventions and institutions, explains them, or even reinforces them; it brings high men low and social criminals to justice, or can be a conduit for truth; it can be an expression of man’s most base and vulgar instincts, the most sophisticated of human reactions, or a challenge to authority.

  And yet, for all these abounding opinions, comedy remains a tricky animal to trap. “The problem of writing about comedy,” Conan O’Brien told me, “it’s like trying to hold a gas, the tighter you squeeze, the more it dissipates.” I agree with Conan, and E. B. White, who said that humor “can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process … and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

  I don’t think what follows offers a solution to t
he quandary, but my chosen format, the oral history, is my way around it. I didn’t want to write about comedy, about why The Simpsons is funny; that’s not only futile, it’s boring. I believe that the most accurate insights are derived from well-told stories, which are hopefully what follows this preface. Comedy is too personal, far-reaching, and complex for me to even attempt to tell you anything about it.

  If you want to know about ancient Greek society, you can read a textbook and come away well informed, if a little bored. Another option would be to read the myths. They won’t tell you everything, but listening to the stories of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Herodotus will fill your head with the dress, wars, economies, and sexual mores that founded Western culture. They may inspire you to read more, even to see history, literature, and art with a new eye. The point is that there are truths in those myths, and they are fascinating. If there’s more to be found underneath the dizzying array of Simpsons anecdotes that follow, I’m certainly glad, but the joy for me isn’t in exploring those larger concepts. It’s writing about all those horny Greek gods as they toy with humans, start wars, and turn peasant girls into magical bears. The goal is to tell the story of The Simpsons, or more to the point, to let the story tell itself.

  And this isn’t the whole story. Far from it. One thing I’ve accepted as a journalist is that the truth, if it exists, is highly elusive. All we have to go on are stories, people’s versions of events. Numbers lie. So do humans. But even more complex is that truths differ. Two witnesses to the same event will never have the same story. I have to believe there are truths in myths, because I believe, from the Bible to the 9/11 Commission Report, stories are what we have to work with. There are facts: I wrote this book; Ali beat Foreman; the tiger attacked Roy. But the minute you go deeper, as soon as you look into how these things happened, or what really happened, you run up against eyewitness accounts, biographies, police reports, and videotapes—all of these will be, unequivocally, someone’s version of events.

  The best way for me to acknowledge and address this problem, especially when my topic was as contentious, bitchy, and riddled with vendettas as The Simpsons, was to tell it as an oral history. The lack of cooperation from Jim Brooks and the current Simpsons staff made this approach even more logical, and even necessary. The fact that these were individuals’ stories is underscored by the narrative coming straight from their mouths. With the exception of gaps filled in by secondary research, some minimal editorial comments, and information conveyed from unattributed sources, I think I’ve managed to do that. There were a host of reasons I wanted this history to be an oral one, not least of which was how much smarter my interview subjects are than I. But this was the major one. Objectivity is horseshit. Let’s hear the good stuff.

  Introduction: “Hi, Everybody!”

  In August 1992, at the Republican National Convention in Houston, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to make families “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.” A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the sitcom’s weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush’s remarks. “Hey! We’re just like the Waltons,” said Bart. “We’re praying for an end to the Depression, too.” While the immediacy of the response was unique, it was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive satire, skewering both the president’s cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Five months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.

  Back in the late eighties, when The Simpsons premiered on Fox, comedically speaking prime-time television was somewhat lacking. Despite some bright spots like Cheers and the cheerfully crude Roseanne, the sitcom roost was ruled by didactic, saccharine family fare: The Cosby Show, Full House, Growing Pains, Golden Girls, Family Ties, and Family Matters. Of the latter, Tom Shales piously declared in The Washington Post, “A decent human being would have a hard time not smiling.”

  It was on this sad entertainment landscape that, in December of 1989, The Simpsons launched its offensive. Prime time had not seen an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and the Christmas special that debuted the series made clear that Springfield and Bedrock were separated by more than just a few millennia. “Couldn’t be better … not only exquisitely weird but also as smart and witty as television gets,” raved the Los Angeles Times. “Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains?” asked USA Today. They were neither human beings nor the least bit decent, but the rich characters, subversive themes, and layered humor resounded deeply with both child and adult audiences demanding more from their entertainment.

  What followed is one of the most astounding successes in television history. The Simpsons went on to be a ratings and syndication winner for twenty years and has grossed sums of money measuring in the billions for Fox. It has garnered twenty-three Emmys and a Peabody Award, and it beat out Mary Tyler Moore, Seinfeld, and the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite to be named Time magazine’s best television series of all time: “Dazzlingly intelligent and unapologetically vulgar, The Simpsons have surpassed the humor, topicality and, yes, humanity of past TV greats.” (Time also named Bart one of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. “[Bart] embodies a century of popular culture and is one of the richest characters in it. One thinks of Chekhov, Céline, Lenny Bruce,” the writer cooed.) Most tellingly, it is the longest-running sitcom ever.

  Such lofty significance was never the goal of Matt Groening, who, with writing aspirations, moved to Los Angeles in 1977, immersing himself in the punk rock scene and working stiff jobs to pay the rent. He recorded his disgust with LA in the comic strip Life in Hell, which transposed Groening’s dissatisfaction, beefs, and whimsical cynicism into the thoughts and speeches of a wordy, deeply cynical rabbit named Binky, his illegitimate son Bongo, and a gay couple—who may or may not be identical twins—named Jeff and Akbar. It found its way into the LA Reader and then LA Weekly, and in 1986, caught the attention of James L. Brooks, legendary writer/producer of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writer/director of Terms of Endearment. Brooks was looking for a cartoon short to place before commercials on The Tracey Ullman Show, which he was producing at the behest of Barry Diller for the struggling Fox network. Groening came up with an idea for a cartoon family, based on his own, called the Simpsons.

  Fox was the new kid on the block and was taking daily beatings in the ratings. Rupert Murdoch had successfully wooed Diller to Fox in 1986, and he’d bet on the right pony. Diller launched some of television’s first reality programming—Cops and America’s Most Wanted—while taking the sitcom in lewd new directions with Married … with Children. While Fox lost approximately $50 million its first year,1 it caught a break in 1988, when the writers in Hollywood went on strike, forcing the major networks (who were bound to the union) to play reruns against first-run shows on the union-free Fox.

  The network began turning a profit, but Diller still didn’t have his monster hit. When Brooks approached him with the idea of making The Simpsons into its own series, Diller bit. “It’s not often I’ve had the experience of watching something great and praying that the next minute doesn’t dash it,” Diller told Newsweek. “And not only having that not happen, but saying at the end: ‘This is the real thing! This is the one that can crack the slab for us.’”

  When it premiered, the show was both a hit and a lightning rod for criticism. Principals around the country banned Bart Simpson T-shirts, with their slogan “Underachiever and proud of it.” Conservatives bristled at a cartoon family portraying such dysfunction and distrust of institutions (police, church, teachers—all are suspect in Springfield), living under the shadow of a dangerous nuclear power plant. Barbara Bush called it “the dumbest thing I had ever seen.” After Marge Simpson wrote her a letter, she apologized.

  But the Bushes had missed the bus. By the summer of 1990, the Simpsons were everywhere. It was Ba
rtmania; America had fallen in love with Homer, Lisa, Marge, Maggie, but especially the spikyhaired, underachieving, authority-challenging Bart. He made the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone.

  Fox struck a deal with Mattel and talking Bart dolls began disappearing from department store shelves. Bart Simpson T-shirts were selling at the rate of a million per day in North America.2 His catchphrases, like “I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” and “Don’t have a cow, man,” became such staples of early nineties lexicon that their overuse would eventually be parodied on the show. The Simpsons Sing the Blues reached number four on the Billboard charts, and bootleg merchandise became as ubiquitous as the real thing. Black Bart T-shirts became a popular phenomenon in African-American communities, with Bart’s catchphrases altered to “Watch it, mon!” and, without irony, “It’s a black thing, you must understand!”

  What is so striking about the early episodes is how sweet, and at times intimately dramatic, they were. “The question was: could you make cartoon characters that looked this weird and grotesque and actually make you feel some real emotion,” Groening has said. The creators achieved this, at least in part through the real-life problems the Simpsons faced: Homer lived in fear of losing his job; he had trouble connecting to his daughter. In later years, to keep the writing interesting, the characters became more exaggerated, as did their situations (Homer went to space; Maggie shot a man; the family created an international incident with Australia).

  Animation opened up a whole new world to the creative staff. Not only could they take their characters anywhere, physically and emotionally, but there were no adorable actors to become tangled up in pubescence, no live studio audience to dictate jokes (even when Seinfeld appeared a year later, certainly a step forward for the sitcom, viewers were still being told when to laugh), and the cartoon format meant that the humor could be riskier than would have been possible otherwise.